


The Gang Miscalculates the Odds

by OystersAintForMe



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: A Weird Amount of Fish Metaphors, Addiction, Bets & Wagers, Canon-Typical Behavior, Canon-Typical Catholicism, Canon-Typical Violence, Explicit Sexual Content, F/F, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Hotels, Humor, M/M, Make Dennis Dumb Again 2k19, Post-Episode: s10e05 The Gang Spies Like U.S., Sharing a Bed, The Yuck Puddle, Tropes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-01
Updated: 2020-05-14
Packaged: 2020-07-28 23:14:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 60,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20072209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OystersAintForMe/pseuds/OystersAintForMe
Summary: After tracing the Great Guigino's Fish Shortage of 2015 back to the unresolved sexual tension between Mac and Dennis, Frank and Charlie decide to take matters into their own hands and convince their friends to finally, FINALLY bang it out. They're going to have to be subtle about it, though. Dee is so sure they will fail that she bets her apartment on it. Frank and Charlie have two days and a lot of connections with the hotel industry. Dee is hell-bent on winning and not even remotely above cheating.I'd say, "What could go wrong?", but, dear reader—you probably already know. :)





	1. "The Gang Does a Cold Open"

**Author's Note:**

> Hey everyone! I have been working on this fic for a VERY long time. I wanted to have it completely finished and polished before I posted any of it, but now season 14 has an premiere date that is fast approaching, and it's mostly finished by now anyway. So I figured I'd just start posting. I am VERY nervous.
> 
> I'm aiming to update this every Thursday. If you find a typo, PLEASE let me know because I would really like to fix it. 
> 
> This fic is lovingly dedicated to the random fanfiction.net user who in 2004 commented my Lord of the Rings rom-com AU and asked "why is everyone gay."

> “The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”  
—David Foster Wallace, _Infinite Jest_

> “To be blunt, Jeff-and-Britta is no Ross-and-Rachel. Your sexual tension and lack of chemistry are putting us all on edge, which is why ironically—and hear this on every level—you’re keeping us from being _Friends_.”  
—Abed Nadir, _Community_, season 1 episode 23, "Modern Warfare"

* * *

Would you like to know how a Yuck Puddle becomes?

It starts very simply: First, there is nothing. And then there is Yuck.

Now, of course Yuck does not appear fully formed as a Yuck Puddle. Certain events must transpire in a certain order for a Certified Yuck Puddle to come into being. 

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves: the first requirement for a Yuck Puddle is Yuck. 

One day, in an unimportant dive bar in South Philadelphia, Yuck appeared on the floor of the men’s bathroom. The Paddy’s Pub employees unacquainted with matters janitorial (i.e., everyone but Charlie Kelly, Registered Janitor) assumed it was a nasty glob of phlegm or jizz or something that Charlie had just missed. 

This should have been their first clue that this was not your ordinary bathroom sludge; Charlie never misses a nice juicy glob of slime. But each of them figured that if it was something to worry about, someone else would bring it up. 

Which, of course, meant that the Yuck was allowed to grow unchecked, until one day it was officially a Yuck Puddle, certified as such by Charlie Kelly, Registered Janitor and Slime Enthusiast. Difficult for the untrained eye to see what the difference is between the Yuck of yesterday and the Yuck Puddle of that day, but there was no ignoring it now: Paddy’s Pub had a Yuck Puddle.

The non-Janitors of the bar demanded to know why Charlie hadn’t cleaned it up, and Charlie protested that he _had_ been cleaning it up. In fact, he had attacked with everything he could get his hands on: Windex, tile cleaner, vodka, bleach, lye, battery acid, Drakkar Noir, crows’ eggs, Fight Milk, the list went on and on. But no matter how much of the Yuck Puddle Charlie managed to eradicate, it always came back the next day, bigger and stronger than before. In short, Charlie explained, the Yuck Puddle could not be permanently destroyed because it was only a symptom; the real problem (the Yuckier Puddle, if you will) was somewhere else. Somewhere out of sight. 

So, to kill the Yuck Puddle, they’d first have to find and identify the Yuckier Puddle. The five of them—Mac, Dennis, Dee, Charlie, and Frank—brainstormed a plan to destroy it until they got bored and moved past it. 

Each of them privately felt that it was probably better to ignore the Yuck Puddle. After all, if Paddy’s had somehow gotten to a stage of disrepair in which mysterious gray-brown sludge was frothing and bubbling and thriving on the men’s room floor, then it was safe to say that there were countless other gnarly botherations lurking underneath the floorboards, in the ceilings, behind the drywall. And once they _knew_ what was causing the problems, then they wouldn’t really have an excuse _not_ to do repairs. 

So they dropped the whole thing.

And it’s fine. It’s _fine_. So Paddy’s Pub has a Yuck Puddle now. Who gives a shit? It is what it is, you know? And, like, if the five of them don’t think about the Yuck Puddle, does it even exist? Y’know? Better not to examine these things too closely. Things fix themselves all the time when you’re not paying attention. 

Of course, if there is one thing that the history of evolution and Jeff Goldblum have taught us, it's that Yuck Puddles will not be contained. 

Yuck Puddles break free. 

They expand to new territories and crash through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously, but, well, there it is.

Yuck Puddles, uh, find a way.

* * *

_ “But you said you loved me!”_

February 2015. 10:30 AM.

_ “I do! Please believe me, Belinda, I do love you, but our families will never let us be together.”_

On a Friday.

_ “Oh, I don’t care what they say, Grant! I don’t care! I would rather die than see you leave me to move to Cincinnati!”_

Philadelphia, PA.

_ “You have to understand, Belinda, there are other things I must think about.”_

_ “You mean Chastity?”_

_ “Yes! My wife may be dead, but my daughter is my whole world, Belinda.”_

_ “Oh, Grant, don’t you see? She’s not even yours!”_

_ “What—Belinda, what are you saying?!”_

_ “You’re not your daughter’s father, Grant! Chastity is…your father’s daughter!”_

“Called it,” Dee says—to absolutely no one, because it’s Friday morning and Paddy’s is closed and this is the only place she could think of to get some goddamn peace and quiet.

_ “How long have you known, Belinda?!”_ Grant is angry-crying. _“How long have you known that my father was sleeping with Marsha?!”_

“Grant, you dumb bitch.” Dee, who’s sitting on the edge of the pool table, chucks a peanut at the television, but she has to use her left hand so she misses by a good two feet and the peanut clatters to the ground. Grant has literally been walking in on his father and Marsha for about four seasons straight, right up until Marsha was murdered by the Russian mob.

Now Belinda is slapping Grant and storming away. The scene fades out and cuts away to a commercial for LifeAlert. For a moment, Dee considers getting one. She does live alone. Might be a good thing to have. 

Then she remembers with dismay that she _doesn’t_ live alone. No, these days, if she happened to like choke on a multivitamin during one of the rare moments she had to herself, a certain two adult idiots would find her within the hour, whether she wanted them to or not. She chucks another peanut at the LifeAlert commercial, throwing harder. 

Goddamn Mac and Dennis won’t even let her _die_ in peace. 

The front door of the bar unlocks with its familiar series of clicks and clunks and the sound alone is enough to make Dee’s spirit wither. She hastily clicks off the TV with the remote and considers bolting for the back door because she does _not_ feel like dealing with anyone right now. Then she remembers her sprained ankle.

Sunlight floods the bar as the door bangs open, followed by a frigid gust of February air. “So what do you think, like, the _mechanics_ are?” 

“Whaddaya mean?” 

“Like, do you think they take turns with it and leave the other one alone? Or maybe they do it side-by-side?”

“Oh, side-by-side. Definitely.”

“Yeah, it’s not even a question, right?”

“Yeah, I think that’s probably been goin’ on for a while, if I’m bein’ honest.” Frank stops in his tracks and looks around the bar. “Hey. Why’re the lights on?”

“Because I’m here, dumbass,” Dee says.

“Dee?” Charlie ducks behind the bar, retrieves two bottles of beer from the fridge, and gives one to Frank, who has slid onto a stool at the end of the bar nearest the door. “What are you doing here? It’s 10:30 in the morning. We don’t open for like three more hours.”

“So? You guys are here,”

“Well, yeah, but we always get here at 10:30 on Fridays,” Charlie says, as though this is information Dee should already know.

“Our Zumba place is just around the corner,” Frank explains. “so we come here for a post-class drink.” 

Sure enough, now that they’ve removed their winter coats, Dee notices that Frank and Charlie are wearing matching purple spandex bodysuits with matching orange sweatbands around their heads. She wrinkles her nose at the sight. “You guys do Zumba?”

“Oh, we do Zumba _so hard_, Dee,” Charlie gloats.

“We’re gettin’ real good at it, aren’t we?” Frank grins and raises his beer to Charlie in a toast, which Charlie returns.

Dee rolls her eyes. “Well, that’s very 2013 of you.” 

“Wait.” Frank frowns and turns to Charlie. “Is it not 2013?”

Charlie swallows his mouthful of beer and then says over a burp, “Nah, dude, it’s 2015.” 

“Ah, shit, really? When did that happen?”

Charlie shrugs. “I dunno, like two years ago?”

“Huh.” Frank takes a drink, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and proclaims: “Time is a tricky bitch.”

Dee, stares at them expectantly, waiting for them to pester her about what _she’s_ doing at Paddy’s all alone on a Friday morning. 

They don’t.

“Well, not that you asked, but _I’m_ here because Mac and Dennis were driving me nuts and I thought maybe I could come to the bar and watch my stories in peace. But clearly the universe doesn’t want me to have nice things, so.”

Charlie snorts. “Why would it?”

“Oh, wait, hang on a second, though,” Frank swivels on his stool to face Dee. “Why exactly were Mac and Dennis drivin’ you nuts? You didn’t catch ’em jackin’ off together, didja?”

“What?! No, ew! They don’t do that!”

Frank quirks a skeptical eyebrow. “They’re human males, Deandra. You really think they don’t jerk off ?”

“No, of course they—Jesus Christ, I can’t believe we’re talking about this. I just meant the _together_ part. They don’t do that _together_.”

“Are you sure, though?” Charlie asks.

Pinching the bridge of her nose, Dee asks, “Why do you _care_ ?”

“Well,” Charlie says, “because Frank and I found out yesterday that Mac and Dennis use your laptop to watch porn and pound it .”

“They _what_ now?” 

“Yeah,” Charlie confirms. “But the thing about that is—like, _duh_, right? I mean, anyone with half a brain could’ve told you they watch porn. No need to keep that a secret.” He leans on the bar with one hand and points at Dee with the other. “The weird thing is that they were trying to be so sneaky about it. Like they made up all that bullshit about the Chinese fish factory spying on us just to get you out of the house and they didn’t even tell me and Frank!” 

“They WHAT now?” Dee repeats, louder this time.

“Right? Isn’t that insane? Like, why wouldn’t they tell us?” 

“No—” 

Charlie ignores her and strides from behind the bar to the pool table as he pontificates. “So, Frank and I were thinking if it was a trade-off situation where one of them, y’know, slaps the salami, so to speak, and the other one gives them space, they wouldn’t think it was that big of a deal. That arrangement wouldn’t warrant quite so much subterfuge, _per se_. _Ipso facto_, we think they’re probably spankin’ ham _together_, that is to say, _next to each other and at the same time_, and that’s why they’re keeping the whole thing a big secret, because they don’t want us to think that they’re gay.” He’s wandered his way over to the back of the bar and leans on the pool table next to Dee, smirking down at her like _Pretty good, eh?_

“Can we go back to the thing about my laptop _real_ quick? And the fish factory?”

“Don’t get off track, Deandra,” Frank warns. “This isn’t about that.”

“Okay well _can_ it be about that? Because my wrist is sprained, my ankle is fucked up, I have like $4,000 in medical bills, my laptop has like a thousand viruses, and my credit card information was stolen last week.”

“What the hell does Mac and Dennis touchin’ dicks have to do with your stolen credit card?” Frank asks. 

“Ah, forget it, dude. If she didn’t even know about the porn, then she definitely doesn’t know the details of their whole thing.”

“Frankly, I don’t know why _you_ two know about it at all,” Dee says. “do men just sit around discussing their masturbation routines or something?”

“Oh, there was…a failed business venture,” Charlie says, choosing his words carefully.

“We got some pornography terms confused with the pastry industry.” Frank waves it off casually. “It happens.”

“Oh, sure, yeah, that could happen to _any_ one,” Dee says, rolling her eyes.

“Shut up, Deandra,” Frank says, sliding off his stool to join Dee and Charlie by the pool table. “The long an’ the short of it is, Mac and Dennis are jackin the beanstalk together, and now we gotta decide how to deal with that. As a gang.” 

“No, we do _not_,” Dee’s voice is sharp and decisive. “There’s nothing to deal with. They’re obviously not doing anything together. That’d be way too gay for them.”

“Well, yeah, but…” Charlie looks at her like she’s an idiot. “They _are_ gay.”

“_Obviously_, but they’re never gonna admit that!”

“Maybe not, but it would really be a lot easier for them if they just banged,” Frank says with a shrug.

“Yeah, and if I’m being honest? It’d also be easier for _us_,” Charlie admits, gesturing between the three of them. “Their weird tension is _kinda_ messing up the vibe of the gang. I mean, Dee, you wound up in the hospital because they can’t admit that they wanna have sex on each other.” 

“I mean…” Dee glances down at her sprained arm in its sling. “I guess.”

“Right?” Charlie nods, encouraged by Dee’s agreement. “But if they just _told_ you they wanted to, y’know—” He performs a complicated gesture that involves slapping the backs of his hands together a few times and then rubbing them against each other.

“Is that supposed to be sex?” Dee asks, already knowing the answer.

“Um, ye—or—no! Shut up! Whatever! What I’m _trying_ to say is if Mac and Dennis started banging, and they were just cool with it and open about it and stuff, then they could have just _told_ you they wanted some alone time and it wouldn’t be weird and then you could’ve gone and, I don’t know, gotten your fingernails waxed or your vagina polished or whatever it is ladies do in their spare time. And then you would’ve never destroyed the fish factory and made Frank pay upwards of 200 dollars for the snapper fish at Guigino’s.”

“Awww, come on! You guys had the snapper?”

“Of course we had the snapper, Deandra,” Frank says. “It’s Guigino’s, ya think we’re not gonna have the snapper?”

“Well, did you at least get me some?”

“Uh, no, because you destroyed the fish factory, which is where the snapper fish comes from,” Charlie explains, and Dee has a war flashback to the taste of those fish guts that fell in her mouth while her hair was caught in that machine, and suddenly she doesn’t have much of an appetite for snapper anymore.

“I think we should just tell ’em,” Frank says, decisive. “Have an intervention or somethin’. Just sit ’em down and say, ‘Hey, we’re gonna save botha youse a lotta hassle and just tell you up front that you wanna bang each other, so, you know, go do it already and stop bein’ pussies about it ’cause it’s annoying as shit and it made the snapper way too expensive.’”

Dee rolls her eyes. “Frank, you _raised_ Dennis. You of all people should know better than to think that Dennis will do something someone tells him to do. Even if he wants to do it. If you just go up to him and say, ‘Hey, go bang Mac,’ then he _never_ will, just to spite you.”

“Ah-ha,” Charlie wags a conspiratorial finger at Dee and wiggles his eyebrows. “Okay, I see what you’re sayin’. I’m smellin’ what you’re steppin’ in. You’re saying we have to be _subtle_ about it.” 

“Ooh! Yes!” Frank immediately tunes into whatever bizarre brainwave Charlie is riding on. “Make ’em think it was _their_ idea.”

“No no no, I’m saying you shouldn’t do anything at all, because it’s pointless. If _that_ was gonna happen, it would’ve happened years ago.” She snatches Charlie’s beer out of his hands and gulps down a significant amount and continues. “And— _and_ —even if someone could, in theory, somehow subtly manipulate Mac and Dennis into banging, it would _not_ be you two. You guys think you know _anything_ about seduction? I mean, Jesus Christ, look at what you’re _wearing_ !” 

“Hey! What’s wrong with what we’re wearing?” Genuinely bewildered, Frank looks down at the purple spandex covering his weird body.

“You spend your spare time pretending to be worms in sewers!”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Charlie stops her, highly offended. “We don’t pretend to be worms _while_ we’re in the sewers, okay? Nightcrawlers is for fun and relaxation. The sewers are strictly a business venture. Don’t mix them up. And give me back my beer.” He plucks the bottle out of Dee’s hand. 

“Anyway, you’re wrong, Deandra. Charlie and I, we _know_ the moves. Me, I choose not to use ’em because I’m old and I got money and not a lotta time left, and whores let me cut to the chase.”

“And me, I don’t use the moves because the Waitress is harder to seduce because she’s all around a better person than everyone else,” Charlie says. “But we _know_ the moves, Dee.”

“Yeah, we know the moves,” Frank agrees.

“And,” Charlie adds, “you’re forgetting that I know Mac and Dennis better than anyone. I know their secrets, alright? I know what’s on their mixtapes. I know what they keep in their wallets. You see what I’m sayin’?” 

Dee shuts her eyes and shakes her head. “You two are goddamn delusional.” 

There’s a long stretch of silence that makes Dee increasingly uneasy, and when she looks up at him, Frank is wearing his signature expression of devilish glee, which is usually accompanied by—oh no— 

“_Please_ don’t say ‘wanna make it—’”

“Wanna make it _interesting_ ?” Frank waggles his eyebrows, shit-eating grin plastered on his face.

“No! No, I do _not_ wanna ‘make it interesting,’ Frank! Friends don’t make bets on their friends’ sex lives. It’s tacky.”

“Since when have I cared about being tacky?”

“Yeah, the man wears Crocs with socks on a daily basis, Dee.” Charlie gestures at Frank’s terrible footwear. 

“Listen, Deandra. How’s about this? Give me and Charlie the weekend to get ’em to bang. If you’re right and we can’t pull it off—” Frank pauses dramatically and Dee rolls her eyes because she knows that nothing he says is going to— “I’ll get ’em their own apartment.”

Now hang on. 

_ That’s_ a tempting proposition.

A little _too_ tempting. There’s gotta be a catch; this is Frank “The Warthog” Reynolds, after all. She narrows her eyes at him, trying to read his expression. “And if they _do_ bang?”

Frank’s grin eats more shit. “You gotta switch apartments with me and Charlie.”

“Whoa, really?” Charlie exclaims in surprise, while Dee shakes her head vigorously while saying,“Oh, _no_. Nooooo. No, no, no, no, no. _No_.” 

“Yes.” Frank nods insistently. “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.”

“Why do you even _want_ my apartment? I thought you guys liked living in squalor and filth.”

“We do,” Charlie says, looking at Frank to answer.

“Don’t worry, Charlie, me ’n’ you can turn any place we live into a shithole.” He turns to Dee and explains, “It’s just that we could really use a workin’ bathroom these days on account a’ Charlie’s lactose intolerant now.

“Hey!” Charlie cries.

“Oh, shit Charlie’s lactose intolerant now?”

“I told you that in confidence, man!”

“In _confidence_?” Frank snorts. “Like you could keep that shit secret. And I mean shit _literally_, Deandra. I mean, the _smell_—”

Dee twists around to give Charlie a sympathetic grimace. “That sucks that you have to quit cheese, huh?”

“I’m not _quitting cheese_, Dee,” he says with the frustration and careful precision of someone who has been over this multiple times already. 

“That’s the problem,” Frank mutters out of the corner of his mouth.

“Come on, Frank!” Charlie screeches.

“Okay, okay,” Frank puts his hands up in surrender. “But let’s just say there’s no question about who’s pooping the bed these days.”

“I have _not_ pooped the bed!”

“Yet,” Frank says, forebodingly.

Dee buries her face in her palm. “Why don’t I have other friends?” she asks no one in particular.

“Because you’re a bad person,” Frank answers.

“Wait, Frank,” says Charlie, “where are Mac and Dennis gonna live when Dee loses? With her in our apartment, or with us in her apartment?”

“They can choose who they wanna live with, let’s go with that,” Frank shrugs. “Whaddaya say, Dee?”

_Uuuh-huh, this my shit, all the girls stomp ya feet like this—_

Dee pulls her phone out of her back pocket. She knows who it is already from the personalized Gwen Stefani ringtone; the screen displays a stock photo of a certain red-and-yellow fast food clown. She lets out a low growl as she slides the thingy to answer. “What do you want, dickwad?”

“Whoa! Yikes, you’re comin’ in hot, Dee!” Mac says, laughing. “You on your period or something?”

“Oh my _god_ I don’t have time for this! Just tell me what you want!”

Frank and Charlie are clearly trying to listen to the conversation, and Dee wants to go hide in the back office or the bathroom or something, but she can’t walk on crutches while talking on the phone. She shoos them away from her, but they don’t move, so she gives up, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees in a desperate attempt at privacy.

“Okay, calm down, Jesus,” Mac says. “You just gotta call your landlord and tell him to fix your toilet.”

_Jesus fuck_. “And _why_ exactly does my toilet need to be fixed, Mac?”

“It’s…” Dee does _not_like the implications of this pause. “..._clogged_.” The word seems to have been chosen very strategically. Dee chooses to ignore that for now.

“Okay, well, there’s a very simple solution for that. Did you try using the plunger?”

“The _plunger_ ?! Ew! No! What am I, a plumber? Call your landlord!” Mac barks into the phone. 

“I’m not gonna call my landlord until you try that _very simple_ solution.” 

“Give me that.” Dee hears Dennis’s voice in the distance. There’s the sound of short tussle and then Dennis’s voice comes through the line, slightly tinged with irritation: “Dee, I don’t think a plunger is gonna work in this situation, because Mac flushed all of his socks down the toilet.”

“He _what_ ?!”

“Whoa, okay, calm down, there’s no need to _yell_ about it,” says Dennis.

Mac cuts in: “I didn’t have any quarters for the washing machine and I had no clean socks so I put all my dirty socks in the toilet and a shit-ton of detergent and I flushed.”

“He thought the flushing would spin the socks around like a washing machine.”

“Which was a genius idea!” 

“I mean, I gotta say, I thought the theory was pretty sound,” Dennis agrees. “But…”

“…it just flushed them,” Mac finishes, resigned.

“Also,” Dennis continues, “there’s quite a bit of foam on your bathroom floor now.”

“Right, yeah, that one’s definitely my bad,” Mac says. “I used dish soap instead of laundry detergent on accident. But the foam’ll just evaporate, so no big deal. The toilet, however, _will_ need a professional so call your landlord, okay? Because Dennis and I aren’t coming to Paddy’s until like five today and I’m already about three beers deep and I don’t wanna start pissing in jars so don’t be a stingy bitch and just call him. Oh! Also, I’m wearing your socks in the meantime because you and I have the same size feet. Ciao!”

“No! Mac, no, don’t wear my—Mac! Hello? _Hello_ ? Oh, goddamnit!” Dee clenches the phone in her hand, fighting the urge to hurl it against the wall because that’s how she broke her last three phones. 

(Correction: her last phone was broken by Charlie, who threw it on the ground and stomped on it after she showed him a picture of The Dress for the first time and they got into a white-and-gold vs. black-and-blue fight. But she’s a good person and accepts responsibility for the two phones prior to that.) 

So, instead of taking out her anger on her phone, she closes her eyes and thinks about returning back home to jars of piss and all of her socks smelling like Mac’s feet. 

This _cannot_ be her life anymore. 

She turns to look at Charlie, then at Frank on her other side. They’re both watching her expectantly from underneath their bright orange sweatbands, their purple spandex shining in the neon lights. 

“So?” Frank prompts. 

Dee fixes him with a steely glare. “It’s on.” 

Frank smirks. “It’s on?”

“Oh, it is _on_.” 

* * *

A quick note about the gang and risk assessment: all five of them are confident that they can pretty much predict the future by this point. It’s just a matter of analyzing where they’ve been, adding in relevant factors of the present situation, accounting for the unexpected, and going from there. Up to this point, they’ve been basically right. Up to this point, nothing has ever really changed. Up to this point, the odds have been in their favor. 

Meanwhile, the Yuck Puddle bubbles ominously on the bathroom floor.

[cue "Temptation Sensation"]

  



	2. "Sweet Dee Breaks the Rules"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The scheming begins; Dee ignores a contract.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I added a "Previously on" feature because I personally cannot remember things from week to week, so if you're like me, then that's for you. :) 
> 
> Also I feel like this should be proofread one more time but I just want to post it before I leave work and hey it's fanfic so who gives a shit? (Me. I give a shit. But I'll proofread later. I'm sleepy right now.) If you notice any typos please please please let me know in the comments or via DM on my tumblr @oystersaintforme.

Previously...

Frank and Charlie bet Dee that they can get Mac and Dennis to hook up. If Frank and Charlie win, they get to trade apartments with Dee. If Dee wins, Frank will pay for Mac and Dennis’s new apartment.

* * *

About an hour after Frank, Dee, and Charlie write up a contract outlining the parameters of the wager—one of which is that Dee ABSOLUTELY, under NO circumstances, CANNOT tell Mac and Dennis about the bet—Dee rushes home to tell Mac and Dennis about the bet.

“Look sharp, dickheads! I got news,” she calls out, dumping her purse on the credenza by the front door. 

Wait. Is that a running faucet?

“Oh, goddamnit.” Dee hurries into the kitchen, where Mac and Dennis are standing in front of the sink. “Stop fucking with the plumbing!”

“We are not _fucking with the plumbing_, Deandra,” Dennis says in that even, analytical voice of his. He and Mac are standing in front of the kitchen sink; neither of them turn to look at her. “What you are witnessing is the methodical testing of a theory. You see, Mac here was telling me that his dick is, quote, ‘too girthy’ for condoms. And yes, he did use the word ‘girthy’—”

“It’s a real word, Dennis!” Clearly the topic has been discussed at great lengths prior to Dee’s arrival. 

“Yeah, it’s not the legitimacy of the word I’m objecting to, buddy. Anyway,” Dennis continues, glancing at Dee over his shoulder, “Mac tells me that there’s no point in him wearing a condom because they’re too small for him, so they break and are rendered useless. That’s his hypothesis, at any rate. So I, being a man of science, and of _reason_, am filling up this condom with water until it bursts in order to prove that there’s no such thing as a dick being too big for a condom.”

Good lord. “Cool story, Dennis, but can you put that on hold for a second? ’Cause I need—”

Mac doesn’t even acknowledge Dee. “This is a stupid experiment, dude. Water and dicks are fundamentally different materials.”

“That’s irrelevant,” say Dennis. 

Goddamn. This could take a while. Dee sits down heavily on one of the chairs at her kitchen table.

“It is so relevant! Look, water, or H2O, as you scientists call it, is wobbly—”

Dennis snorts. “‘Wobbly’? That the technical term, doctor?” 

“Don’t patronize me, Dennis,” Mac warns. “Water is wobbly, which means it can conform to the shape of the condom. Dicks, on the other hand, are hard.” He emphasizes this claim by thrusting his fist upward from his hip, arm bent at the elbow, seemingly to provide a visual example of a boner. Then he slaps his fist around with his other hand to illustrate his next point: “Ya see? There’s no give there.”

Jesus Christ. Dee rests her forehead on the kitchen table and tries to tune them out. 

“But look how big this thing is getting!” Dennis cries. “Even if water is more wobbly or whatever—I mean, come on, dude. Your dick cannot possibly be that big.” 

“But ya got no friction here.” Mac jabs his finger a few times at the distended condom. It jiggles. “See, Dennis, when a man is having sex, his dick is all rubbin’ up against stuff.” He rubs his palms together quickly to demonstrate while continuing his explanation: “So, that friction, combined with the condom being stretched too thin—because again, my dick is very girthy—is what makes the condom break.” He claps his hands together once with a loud smack.

“Oh, buddy,” Dennis chuckles, shaking his head. “If you’ve got that much friction when you’re having sex with someone, then you’ve got far bigger problems than condom etiquette.”

Mac, of course, takes immediate offense. He steps back from the sink, chin jutting out, neck high, fists clenched and at the ready. “What are you saying, bro?” 

“I’m saying, have you never heard of lube?” Dennis shakes his head. “You know, I don’t know why we’re bothering with this. I mean, it’s not like you’re getting laid anytime soon.”

“Oh, yeah? Well—” Instead of a retort, Mac lunges at the sink, yanks the condom off the faucet, and lobs it at Dennis, who stumbles backwards upon its impact, water gushing out all over his light blue button-down. 

Mac lets out a manly whoop, raising his hands in the air like he just scored a touchdown. 

“What the fuck, Mac!” 

“See, bitch? I told you! Condoms break easier when they get stretched out. So you can take all your science and all your reason and all your condoms and shove ’em where the sun don’t shine,” Mac cries, a huge grin on his face.

“The condom didn’t break, idiot! It spilled.” Dennis unbuttons his soaked shirt, whips it off, shoves it at Mac’s chest, and stomps over to his suitcase on the floor behind Dee’s couch. 

“Yeah, okay, whatever helps you sleep at—” Mac spins around to continue gloating at Dennis, but stops when his eyes land on Dee sitting at the table. “Dee? When did you get here?”

Dee has no intention of dignifying that with a response, and it doesn’t matter, because Dennis just keeps on ranting as he digs through his clothes: “And—and! If that’s your proof that condoms don’t work for you, like if your idea of a condom not working is jizz spilling out of it, then that would actually mean that your dick is too small to properly fill out a regular condom.”

Mac smirks at Dee. “He’s just mad because I won.”

Dennis calls out, “No you didn’t!” 

“And because my dick is bigger than his.”

Dennis clarifies, “No it’s not!”

Mac says something else, but Dee doesn’t care. She’s distracted—and appalled—by Mac tossing Dennis’s shirt in the oven and setting the temperature to 200 degrees. “What the fuck are you doing, Mac?!”

“Oh, like I’m gonna spend fifty whole cents to dry clothes in the dryer. Not all of us can be fat cat billionaires, Dee.”

Dee limps over to Mac as fast as she can; Mac sees her coming and drops to his knees to shield the oven with his body. Dee whacks Mac’s ribs with the end of her crutch; Mac cries out but holds his ground. Steadying herself against the counter, Dee grabs at the oven door handle; Mac attacks with full force by chomping hard into the fleshy part of her hand, just below her thumb. 

Dee yelps and yanks her hand back. “Did you really just bite me, you goddamn son of a bitch?!” 

Mac flips around and presses up against the oven door with his back with his feet planted on the ground in front of him. “What’re you gonna do about it?”

In response, Dee growls and grabs a fistful of Mac’s greased-up hair and pulls straight up, as hard as she can. Over Mac’s pained howling, she shouts, “Dennis, please tell Mac not to put clothes in the oven!” 

“Why would I tell him that?” Dennis pokes his head over the back of the couch, profoundly unbothered by the brawl taking place in the kitchen. “Not all of us can be fat cat billionaires, Dee. Have some mercy for the proletariat.”

“What the hell did you just call me?” Mac is on his feet in less than a second and stalking towards Dennis like a dog stalks towards a mailman: hackles raised and absolutely ready to throw down, even if he’s not completely sure why. 

Dee seizes the opportunity to get the shirt out of the oven and drapes it over the back of one of her kitchen chairs. “Look, Mac, if you’re really so broke that you can’t pay for the dryer, just let your clothes goddamn air dry, okay?” 

Mac instantly drops his beef over the word “proletariat” and swivels around to Dee to sigh with his entire body, like an overworked five-year-old being told to do more chores. “But that takes so long, Dee!”

“You two are the laziest people I have ever met in my entire life.” 

Dennis pops up behind the couch, buttoning up a new shirt. “Shut up, bird.” 

Mac, of course, guffaws at the insult like he always does, like he’s surprised by it, like it’s the first time he’s heard it. Dee will never understand how a joke as overdone and low-effort as the bird thing could remain so funny for such a long time. Actually, calling it a “joke” at all is far more generous than it deserves. No wonder the guys don’t understand her comedy; they don’t even know what comedy is.

“Jesus Christ.” Dee inspects the bite mark on her hand while Mac and Dennis keep making bird sounds. “You guys gotta get out of here before you burn down my apartment too.”

Mac snorts. “Oh, yeah, sure, we’ll just scoot right on out of here because finding an affordable apartment in Philadelphia is just so easy. Gee, Dennis, why didn’t we think of—”

Dee cuts Mac off with a hand. She’s made an executive decision. “Spare me the sarcasm, okay? I’ve got big news.”

Dennis and Mac exchange a glance and then they both snicker. “Nah,” Dennis says. 

“No, seriously, this is huge news! Just listen to me for like two seconds.”

His voice pinched with mock regret, Dennis says, “Ooh, sorry Dee, I really wish we could but unfortunately we don’t give a shit.”

“You don’t even know what my news is.”

“Doesn’t matter,” says Mac. “We already know we don’t care.”

If Dee’s eyelids were jaws, then several teeth would break from the force with which she clenches them shut. 

“Exactly, thank you,” Dennis says to Mac. “Because it’s really not about what she’s saying, you know?”

“Right, it’s about who’s saying it.” 

“So I guess it would be more accurate to say that we don’t give a shit about you, Dee, because—”

“FRANK AND CHARLIE THINK YOU GUYS WANNA BANG.” 

Dee practically hears a record scratch. 

It is delightful. 

For a full five seconds, Dee watches Mac and Dennis try to figure out how to respond, their mouths opening and closing like fish, their expressions an enormously satisfying seafood stew of shock, confusion, and a very generous dollop of morbid curiosity, all topped with a sprinkling of disgust. (Not the real stuff, though—more like the imitation crab version of disgust. But still entertaining.)

Finally, Dennis croaks out, “You mean, like, each other?”

“Noooo, I mean Justin fucking Bieber.” God, it feels great to lean into the sarcasm. 

“But—but why do they think that?” Mac asks, panicked.

“Hmm, good question, Mac.” Dee pretends to think about it. “I think it might something to do with you lying to me about forcing me to go undercover in a Chinese chop-fish pull-gut factory just so you two could have the apartment to yourself to watch porn and toss the turkey together.” 

Mac and Dennis exchange surreptitious glance. “‘Toss the turkey’?” Mac repeats, laughing like it’s the most ridiculous thing he’s ever heard. “What does that even mean?”

Dennis laughs too. “Right, like, what—you think we’re playing catch with—with a turkey?” 

“No, dipshit. I’m talking about, y’know…” She mimes jacking off. 

Mac and Dennis erupt in protests consisting entirely of half-formed words until Dennis manages to get out, “It’s not together together!”

“Right, we don’t—we’re just in the same room. We don’t do it at the same time.”

“Wait.” Dee wrinkles her nose. “So one of you diddles yourself while the other one, what, just watches?”

“Supervises,” Dennis corrects emphatically. 

Dee’s eyebrows shoot up so fast she’s surprised they don’t fly right off her head. “Oh my god, that’s so much weirder, you guys.” 

“No, no, you’re—you’re getting it all—” Dennis presses the heel of his palm to his forehead like that somehow physically stops more words from tumbling out of his mouth. After he regroups, he speaks slowly and deliberately: “Mac and I have discussed this is great detail. It would be weirder if we did it at the same time.”

“But why can’t one of you just, like…leave?” 

“Well, but what if one of us gets into a jam, Dee?” Mac is clearly shocked Dee has never considered that before. “It’d be silly not to have the other one there.”

“Silly? Mac, that sounds downright dangerous.”

This might actually be the most ridiculously delusional thing Dee has ever heard come out of anyone’s mouth. She has to laugh. “What kind of a jam could you get into while watching porn?” 

“You know, like—if—what if—you know?” Dennis squeaks. He looks at Mac helplessly, but Mac just stares at the ground, shifting his weight from foot to foot, his hair sticking up in every direction from when Dee pulled it. When Mac won’t meet his eye, Dennis looks away, rubbing the back of his neck the way he does when he’s trying to look casual. They’re completely flustered and Dee is loving every second of it. 

But as tempting as it is to keep making them squirm, she can sense that they’re starting to notice the cracks in their defense. And that’s a dangerous road to go down if she wants to win this bet. 

So she takes a breath, does a careful three-point turn, and backtracks smoothly, “Don’t worry, I’m just bustin’ your balls. You’re two adult men, and you have…needs, or whatever, which is gross, but you’re just doing what you have to do. Doesn’t mean you wanna bang.” 

“Thank you!” Dennis says, deeply relieved.

“It’s just that Frank and Charlie think it does.” 

“Well, fuck Frank and Charlie!” Mac shouts. “I don’t give a shit what they think. I don’t wanna bang any dudes. And even if I did wanna bang dudes, I wouldn’t wanna bang Dennis. Are you kidding me? That’s disgusting.”

“Hang on.” Dennis frowns, surprised and ego-bruised. “‘Disgusting’?” 

Ooh. Yikes. Hazardous road conditions again. Calculating alternate route. “Hey, hey, hey now! You guys don’t have to defend yourselves to me. I’m on your side here. In fact, I’m so on your side that I bet them you wouldn’t bang.” 

“Oh.” Dennis puts his hands on his hips as he absorbs this. “Well. That’s. You mean like a literal bet?” 

“Like a literal bet,” Dee confirms. “Yeah, they claimed that they could, like, psychologically manipulate you two into banging within the next two days. And of course I bet them that they couldn’t. And if they lose—when they lose—Frank’s gonna pay your rent for an apartment of your own for a year.”

“Wait, seriously?” says Dennis.

“And, if we’re being realistic, it’ll probably be longer than a year, because he’ll almost definitely forget why he’s paying your rent in the first place and he’ll just keep doing it until he dies or something.”

“Holy shit, Dee!” Mac actually sounds impressed. 

Dee puts a humble hand over her heart and nods. “Thank you, thank you, all in a day’s work.” She strides over to the fridge and grabs a can of beer, sets it down on the table, and pries open the tab. “But remember, Frank and Charlie are going to spend the weekend trying to trick you two into banging. They’re coming up with a whole scheme and shit. I don’t know what it involves, I’m not allowed to know, but I’ll gather as much intel as I can. I wouldn’t worry too much though.”

“Oh, I’m not worried at all,” says Dennis. 

“Me neither,” Mac agrees. “Frank and Charlie are stupid as hell.”

“There’s just one more thing: you can’t let on that you know about the bet, because I wasn’t supposed to tell you any of this. And if you do let on that you know, then the whole jig is up and then I lose the bet even if you guys don’t bang.”

“Oh? And what happens if you lose the bet?” Dennis asks, not seeming too concerned. Dee fixes him and Mac with a meaningful look to get them to understand that they really need to listen up here and watches their expressions shift from elation to terror. Dennis, now with a quiver to his voice, repeats, “What happens if you lose the bet, Dee?”

“I have to switch apartments with Frank and Charlie.” 

A pause.

“That’s it?” Mac laughs. “So what?”

“Yeah, that sucks for you, Dee, but you seem to have forgotten—we don’t give a shit about you.”

“Oh, right!” Dee smacks her forehead. “How could I forget? Guess this whole thing doesn’t matter to you guys after all. Just real quick, remind me…where would you two live?”

“What are you talking about?” Dennis asks, still grinning, not getting it. 

“Well, you guys can’t afford your own apartment as it is, right? So, if I lose, are you gonna live here, with Frank and Charlie and Frank’s toe knife and Charlie’s new lactose intolerance issues and, oh gosh, any number of worms—tape, ring, and otherwise? Or are you gonna live in that shithole studio with me and the rats and cats and the bedbugs and the ghosts of murder victims and the complete lack of a working bathroom?” 

The color drains from their faces. She notes with glee that she’s made their faces go to a lot of extremes in the last ten minutes. She’s gonna ride on this high for a long time. 

Finally, Mac asks weakly, “Charlie’s lactose intolerant?”

“That’s what you’re concerned about?” Dennis cries. “Dee, why would you agree to that?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, are you worried about losing the bet, Dennis? You think you’re gonna bang Mac?”

“You know that’s not what I meant, Dee. Come on. Of course I’m not gonna—I’m just saying that your apartment is, you know—it’s a—it affects more people than just you if you lose, is what I mean. Not like you’re going to lose,” Dennis adds hastily, “but it’s—you know, like, you should’ve asked us first if—but I mean, it’s not like we’re—goddamnit.” He cuts himself off and hangs his head. 

“I think what Dennis is trying to say is that you should’ve consulted us first,” Mac says helpfully.

“I’m consulting you now, aren’t I?”

“Yeah, but now you’re already locked into the bet!”

“I don’t get why you’re worried about this! All you two dicknips have to do is A., grit your teeth through whatever grotesque shit Frank and Charlie pull off, B., don’t let on that you know anything, and C., not have sex with each other. Just two days of that, and then I get my space back and you’ll be in a spacious, sunlit two-bed two-bath in no time. Guys,” Dee grins. “This literally couldn’t be easier.”

Mac and Dennis look at each other and have an entire conversation using only their eyebrows. Then Dennis nods at Dee. “Fine. We’re in.” Immediate subject change: “You want another beer, Mac?”

And that’s that. All in all, the whole thing actually went better than Dee expected. Clearly they’re not too bothered by the whole thing, which means that they’ve buried their boners for each other so deeply that they don’t even know the boners exist, which is a point in Dee’s favor.

But then Dee sees it: a look that flashes over Mac’s face as he watches Dennis bend over to reach into the fridge, and that high that she was planning on riding for the next couple weeks comes crashing back to the ground. The only thing Dee to which can compare Mac’s expression is the middle beat of a double take—the beat after the character registers that something might have been weird about whatever he just saw, but right before he looks again to confirm. 

Oh god. Pins and needles of anxiety prick up Dee’s scalp and down the back of her neck as it dawns on her: it doesn’t matter whether Mac was aware of his boner for Dennis or not, because he sure as hell is now. 

And whose fucking fault is that, Deandra? You shouldn’t have told them about the bet, you stupid bitch. You never think things through. You might as well run away to Wyoming and live in a trailer in the middle of the prairie for the rest of your pathetic, miserable dumpster fire of a life, you worthless piece of—

Mac’s expression holds long enough for Dee to spiral all the way to rock bottom—so, you know, about half a second—and then his face goes back to neutral in an instant. And now Mac is saying, “Yeah dude, beer me,” and Dennis is throwing a bottle at him and the bottle is crash-landing on Dee’s coffee table and shattering and they’re all yelling at each other and good old reliable anger kicks Dee’s worry aside like it’s nothing more than a crushed-up can of Wolf Cola. 

* * *

Later that evening, Dennis drives Mac and Dee to the bar. It’s only 4:30 but it’s already dark out, because it’s goddamn February.

Dennis hates February. It’s the shortest but the worst of the winter months. You get through January, which is thirty-one days, but the year is still new and fresh and it still feels like things might change for the better. And then fucking February, that goddamn vacuum of joy, kicks down the door and forces upon you twenty-eight days of soul-crushing monotony, a four-week long kick to the nutsack that mercilessly beats your spirit into the ground, with nothing to look forward to except March, which is thirty-one more days of dirty snow and mud. But least once March hits you can see the light at the end of the tunnel; February is just pitch darkness. 

And this February has been particularly awful for Dennis, from the whole group-dating fiasco to banging that trashy gecko-tat chick in the luggage hold of that plane to randomly getting diagnosed with a personality disorder by some quack psychiatrist that Dee believed for some reason and now she won’t stop giving him shit for it, and now this bullshit with the bet.

Actually, come to think of it, things have been shitty for Dennis since last November when the apartment burned down. For one thing, it’s fucked with his game. Now, it’s not like he can’t score any women. It’s just that he has nowhere to bring them, and going back to the girls’ apartments throws him off; he doesn’t have the home field advantage. The result is that the D.E.N.N.I.S. System has been collecting metaphorical dust in the basement ever since last Thanksgiving, along with his surveillance equipment and some old exercise bike that Mac keeps under a sheet and which Dennis has never once seen him use. 

But honestly, all that is fine. 

Has Dennis had sex recently? Not physically. But is he going through one of those so-called “dry spells” you hear lesser men complain about? Absolutely not.

Dennis could get laid if he wanted to. It’s just that he knows his current living situation cannot yield a sexual experience that meets the high standards to which he has become accustomed. He’d rather wait until he knows the encounter will be perfect instead of wasting energy having sex that he knows is going to be subpar. 

So, no, he’s not “sexually frustrated.” He’s choosing this. 

…okay fine maybe he’s a tiny bit sexually frustrated but come on! Can you blame him? He’s a healthy adult male living practically on top of two other fully grown humans in a one-bedroom shithole. The only time he gets to himself is when he’s in the shower, and even then Dee and Mac are constantly barging in to pee or to brush their teeth or to nag him about where he put the remote or to tell him about a weird dream they had. And despite what online forums might tell you, going six goddamn months without busting a nut—a real nut, mind you, not just a rush job in the five minutes between Mac putting far too much gel in his hair and Dee spilling a bottle of Alka-Seltzer into the toilet—well, it starts to make a guy go a little fucking insane. 

But necessity is the mother of invention, as they say, and Dennis knew Mac must have been in the same boat. So he started problem-solving. 

Coming up with the solution was simple enough. After all, it would be easier to get one person out of the apartment than two. Far from the most genius thing Dennis has ever come up with. The Olympic feat of manipulation, though, which led Mac to believe that he came up with the idea himself—since Dennis knew Mac would never go for it otherwise—well, Dennis has to say that he’s quite proud of that. 

And okay, the solution wasn’t optimal. But it worked! And now Frank has the audacity to say Dennis wants to fuck his high school weed dealer who cuts all the sleeves off of the t-shirts he steals from the Salvation Army so he can show off the shitty “tribal” tattoos he got with a fake ID when he was fifteen? It’s Frank’s fault their apartment burned down in the first place! Who starts a money fire?! That’s like refusing to give your dog food and then getting mad when it starts eating out of the garbage. It’s Frank’s fault Dennis couldn’t get laid. It’s Frank’s fault Dennis had to resort to watching porn and jacking off with Mac. And it’s Frank’s fault that they can’t even do that anymore. 

Dennis is refusing to let all that get to him, though. There are more important things at hand. 

“No, see, that’s where you’re wrong,” Dennis is telling Mac, who is sitting in the passenger’s seat and drinking a blue Gatorade. “I was definitely the one to come up with the denim cutoffs.”

“No, dude. Charlie was definitely the one who told me about them. He showed me how low he could go.”

“Yes, but I was the one who showed Charlie.”

“No, dude. Charlie didn’t say anything about you showing him.” 

“Then I’m going to sue Charlie for copyright violation and theft of intellectual property.”

Mac scoffs. “No you are not.”

“I am. Just to spite you.”

“I’m not saying you can’t try, but you won’t be able to. You can’t copyright jean shorts. No one can.” 

“Actually, you can copyright anything,” Dee butts in from the backseat. “You just have to add that little ‘C’ with the circle thingy around it, and then add you the date and your name, and boom—it’s copyrighted.” 

Mac rolls down his window and tosses out an empty bottle of Gatorade he just finished. “That’s bullshit, Dee. You need to get the government involved to copyright something.”

“Common misconception,” Dee says. 

Mac cranes his head around to look at her. “Okay, so if it really is that easy, then don’t you think someone else already did it?”

“Do you see anybody walkin’ around wearin’ jean shorts with a copyright symbol on the ass?” Dennis says, taking one hand off the steering wheel to gesture broadly to the world at large. 

Mac cries, “It’s February! Why would anyone be wearing jean shorts?” 

“I meant in general, dipshit.” 

“Well, why are you assuming that the symbol would be on the ass?” Mac counters. “Maybe it’s on the inside.”

Dennis stops at a red light. “The symbol wouldn’t be on the inside.” 

“Have you looked?” 

“No, I haven’t looked, because I know there’s nothing to—”

“How would you know for sure that there’s nothing there if you’ve never—”

“Who the hell else would try to copyright jean shorts?!”

“Dukes of Hazzard,” Mac says immediately.

Dennis thinks about that. “Ah, shit. That’s a good point.”

The light turns green and soon enough Dennis is parking by the preposterous two-foot-high curb in front of the bar. No other cars on the street. Gonna be a slow night.

Dennis takes a deep breath as he approaches the front door, because he knows Frank and Charlie are waiting inside. And it’s not necessarily a _big_ feeling, but he has the slightest sensation that he’s marching to his death. 

“Oh Ma-ac! Den-nis!” comes Frank’s sing-songy voice from the back office, and Dennis can just _hear_ his shit-eating grin. He meets Mac’s eyes, which give the barest hint of an eyeroll.

Standing in front of the desk, they watch Frank lean back in The Chair That Smells Like Their Butts, his arms crossed over his belly. He sniffs loudly and looks down his nose at them. “I’m sending youse on a business trip.”

A business trip? That’s it? That’s the angle? Dennis suppresses a laugh.So stupid. Child’s play, really. And easy as hell to get out of. He doesn’t know why he was worried. “Paddy’s doesn’t do business trips, Frank.”

“We do now.” Frank grins. “I found a potential investor. You two are gonna go up inna the Poconos and meet with this guy. He’s stayin’ at his winter home there. I booked you a room at a hotel close by.” He peers at them over the rim of his glasses, eyebrows raised, like he’s daring them to object.

But why would they? A weekend in the mountains on Frank’s dime? Sounds good to Dennis. 

Stupid Mac, though, blurts out, “But you know Dennis and I aren’t g—”

“Good,” Dennis rushes, stomping on Mac’s foot to shut him up. Mac winces, but when his eyes catch Dennis’s laser-pointed glare, he catches on and works hard to keep his expression neutral. Dennis finishes, “We’re not good. At, uh. Finances.”

“Well, speak for yourself, Dennis—” Mac interjects.

Dennis shoots Mac a look but Frank stops them with a wave of his hand. “You don’t need to know how finances work. You just gotta sell us. Play up our strong points. And you two are the obvious choice to go, since you’re the two most palatable employees. After me, of course.”

“So why don’t _you_ go?” Mac asks. Goddamnit, why isn’t Mac just agreeing to this? They knew this was coming.

“None of your business. I’m your boss, and you listen to me. You go or I’ll dock your pay.”

“What pay?!” Mac cries. “You haven’t given us a paycheck in three weeks!”

“And you won’t get one for another three unless you go to this meeting!” Frank slams the desk with his hand for emphasis. 

“Stop!” Dennis holds up a truce-making palm towards each of them. “Mac, this is gonna be fine.” He looks at Mac significantly and speaks slowly to make sure Mac understands the subtext of what he’s saying, which to be honest is asking a lot of him: “There is no reason why this would be bad, _right_? This is probably a _very good thing_ for us. Right?” 

After a moment, Mac hangs his head and shrugs. 

“You leave tomorrow morning,” Frank says. “I’ll text you the rest of the info. Now get outta here. ” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you liked it! If you did, leave a comment or kudos, bookmark it, tell your friends, etc., you know the deal. 
> 
> If you do comment, I WILL respond eventually! :) I esp. love hearing what things people found funny, if anything. 
> 
> Come yell at me on tumblr! I'm @oystersaintforme


	3. "Baby Boy and Wile E. Coyote: Ultimate Paddy's Bathroom Showdown"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Charlie confuses Mac, Dee confuses Dennis, Mac and Dennis confuse each other, and a dormant term of endearment makes a reappearance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I meant to post this last Thursday, but life caught up with me. I'm gonna try to be more consistent, but I have ADHD so I really can't make promises lolololol but I love y'all, your comments have been making my month.

_Previously, on Lost…_

Dee tells Mac and Dennis about the parameters of the bet; they agree to do it, albeit somewhat reluctantly. Privately, Dennis is pissed about the whole thing; he’s sexually frustrated and he doesn’t appreciate the judgement he’s getting about the solution he and Mac came up with. At the bar, Frank tells Mac and Dennis they’re going on a business trip to the Poconos to talk with potential investor. Mac weirdly tries to get them out of it, so Dennis stomps on his foot, and they agree to go to the Poconos. 

_...and that’s what you missed on Glee!_

* * *

Mac stumbles aside as Dennis pushes past him, storming out of the back office and striding down the length of the bar. “DEE. KEG ROOM. NOW.” 

Dee, who’s sitting in one of the booths and reading a magazine, looks over her shoulder at Dennis, then at Mac, eyebrows quirked like What’s Up His Ass? 

Mac, still at the door of the back office, shrugs like Don’t Look At Me. 

Dee rolls her eyes like Whatever I Don’t Give A Shit and then slides off her stool and hobbles on her crutches into the keg room. Dennis slams the door shut behind her. 

Mac closes the office door behind him and leans over the bar, resting on his elbows. When you live with someone as long as Mac has lived with Dennis, you learn how to read them like a book. In fact, Mac can read Dennis even better than he can read a book. So, accounting for all of the facts, Mac can confidently conclude: 

Dennis = Mad. 

The reason remains to be determined, however. Dennis gets angry so often and so easily these days, sometimes for what seems like no reason at all. But the smarting in his foot from when Dennis stomped on it a minute ago points to Mac playing a role here. 

Which is _total_ bullshit. Even when Mac replays the whole interaction with Frank in his head, he can’t figure out what he could possibly have done wrong. He actually tried to get them _out_ of the whole thing, thinking maybe if he could poke enough holes in Frank’s scheme, they wouldn’t have to go through with the weekend at all. Mac was helping! 

And now Dennis is gonna sneak off into the keg room and whisper secrets with Dee? Dee, the bitch who got them into this mess in the first place? If anyone needs to be whispering secrets with Dennis, it’s _Mac_. 

“Boy, he’s all worked up, huh?” 

“Charlie?” Mac scans the room. “Where are you?”

“Down here.”

Mac looks behind the bar where Charlie is on his hands and knees, scrubbing at some kind of goop on the floor with a dirty toothbrush. “Gross,” Mac remarks. 

“Hey, don’t I know it.” Charlie doesn’t look up from his task. “So. What’s got Dennis’s panties in an uproar?”

“I’m not sure,” Mac says honestly. 

Charlie shakes his head and chuckles. “Classic Dennis.” He stops scrubbing the goop for a second and leans in to take a closer look at it, but he’s doing it in a way that seems just a little pretendy. Like he’s trying to act casual but he’s not actually feeling casual at all. “Frank told me you guys are going on a business trip.”

Mac lowers himself to the ground and sits with his back against the rear cabinets. “Guess so.”

“Pretty sweet deal. You guys gonna get your own rooms, you think? Or are you gonna share?”

“Uh, I don’t know. I didn’t really think about it.”

“I hear it’s real nice up there,” Charlie says, and although he’s returned to scrubbing away, his voice takes on some kind of old-timey, wistful accent, like he’s talking about the Promised Land or something. “Town’s kind of hidden away, kind of secret. You could be anything you wanted to be out there…or any_one_.” On that last word, Charlie whips his face towards Mac, one eyebrow arched dramatically. 

Mac rolls his eyes. “I guess.” 

Charlie returns to his goop. “I’m just trying to say, it might be nice for you two to get away together. You’d have the privacy for your whole, you know, slammin’ the salmon scheme.” 

Mac hates to admit it, but aside from his unfortunate phrasing, Charlie’s not wrong. It would be nice. Doesn’t matter, though, since he and Dennis aren’t gonna do be doing anything like that _now_. “Well, we’re not bringing the laptop with us, so.” 

“So what? Can’t you just buy porn from the TV channel store? Isn’t that a thing people do in hotels?”

“I don’t know, Charlie,” Mac exasperates. 

“Pretty sure I’ve seen people do it in movies and stuff.” 

“I mean, they do, but—no. Dennis and I aren’t not gonna do that.” 

“Why not?”

“Why do you care?” Mac snaps. 

“Oh!” Charlie screeches, turning on Mac like a feral dog. Mac rolls his eyes. “So suddenly I’m not allowed to have sympathy for my best friends who burned their apartment down?! Suddenly I’m forbidden from being invested in their mental and physical well-being?!”

“Charlie—” 

Charlie’s gone wild in the eyes, jerking and flinging his arms around in the air like a marionette controlled by a puppeteer on crack. “I’m sorry, I thought we lived in _America_!” 

“Hang on. Are you calling me un-American, bro?” Mac barks, voice low, neck high. “Don’t joke about that shit, dude!”

“I’m not joking!” Charlie squawks. “You’re restricting my personal freedoms, my rights as an _American_, to make sure my best friends are getting their rocks off. That’s in the Constitution, man. Like at _least_ the third amendment. Seventh, tops.” 

“You have never _once_ read the United States Constitution.”

“Bro, I read the United States Constitution every single day of my life.”

Mac explodes: “You can’t read!” 

“_You_ can’t read!”

Mac’s anger burns hot and fast and then fizzles out. This is all so fucking pointless. If Dennis were here, Mac would ask him to take over handling Charlie this time. But instead Dennis is scheming with Dee (of all people!), so Mac just closes his eyes, lets the back of his head thump on the cabinet behind him, and mutters, “You’re an idiot.”

“Oh, _I’m_ the idiot? I’m not the one not taking advantage of the privacy of a sweet hotel room in the middle of nowhere.”__

“There’s nothing to take advantage _of_.”

“Oh, come on, Mac. You can’t tell me you’ve never even _thought_ about it.”

“Of course I haven’t!” 

At least, not in any way that _matters_. Like, there are thoughts you think and then there are thoughts that kind of, well, think themselves. It’s like someone (the devil, probably) pops into your brain and takes control and makes you think strange things, things you don’t want to think about, things you’d never admit to thinking about—awkward what-ifs with horrible consequences. 

By now, Mac has learned that there’s not really much of a point in trying to stop those thoughts from happening. That would be like trying to stop a garbage man from picking up your trash, y’know? It’s a dirty job, but the devil’s gotta do it. How else would God test your faith?

But—and this is one of Mac’s most favorite things about God—thoughts don’t matter to Him. Actions do. God’s got _way_ bigger fish to fry than punishing someone who’s only _thinking_ about his best friend sucking his dick and Mac never takes action on any of those gay thoughts (except when he does) so it doesn’t matter at all and he’s still gonna go to Heaven and Dennis is too (because he _is_ going to repent for his sins one day, Mac just _knows_ he is) and they’re going to live in an exact replica of their old apartment except they’ll have free cable and a fireman’s pole instead of stairs and their kitchen sink won’t leak. 

Charlie doesn’t understand that sort of shit, though. 

Mac inspects a hangnail on his thumb. “Well, it doesn’t even matter because Dennis wouldn’t want to either, so it’s, like, not even a discussion.” He leans forward and opens the cabinet behind him and pokes around inside, just to give himself something else to focus on. Maybe he can find something to distract Charlie. He shoves several almost-empty liquor bottles to the side and finds a jug of some dark red juice—bingo. “Dude, this cranberry juice expired in 2003.”

“I think he might want to,” Charlie says, resisting the temptation of expired juice with what Mac knows must take enormous effort. “Lately he’s kinda been sending some serious ‘I wanna suck your dick’ vibes your way.” 

Mac bangs his head on the top of the cabinet. 

It’s not true. Charlie is making shit up. He’s just saying that to win the bet. Mac knows that. He is one-hundred percent aware that it’s not true. He just didn’t expect Charlie to be so blunt. He removes himself from the cabinet, rubbing the tender spot on the back of his head, and asks, “He is?” 

Charlie flicks his eyes up from the goop to Mac and tries not smirk. “I dunno, man. He’s clearly into you. Always touchin' you. Checkin' you out when you’re not looking. Callin' you ‘baby boy’ and stuff.” 

“He doesn’t do that anymore.” 

Charlie scratches at the goop with his fingernail. “Well, he doesn’t smile nearly as much when you’re not around and that's just a fact.”

“Gay,” Mac humphs halfheartedly. 

“Yeah, kind of,” is Charlie’s distracted response.

Mac drags his finger through a thick layer of dust on the bottle of cranberry juice. It’s not true. 

Charlie appraises the spot where the goop was, and, apparently satisfied with his work, he chucks the toothbrush over his shoulder and jerks his chin towards the cabinet next to Mac. “All set. Now.” Charlie waggles his devilish eyebrows at Mac. “Let’s crack open that cranberry juice, right?” 

Mac sighs as he picks up the bottle and unscrews the cap. “Obviously.” 

* * *

“So what’s up your ass?” Dee asks after Dennis slams the keg room door shut. 

He advances on her with an accusatory finger pointed at her face. “Dee, you _really_ fucked up this time.” 

She just fucking _laughs_. “Excuse me?”

“Do you _think_?” Dennis knocks sharply on her head twice before she shoos him away like a fly. “Do you have any brain at all inside that thick shit skull of yours? Or are you some kind of brainless zombie who used to be Dee and I just couldn’t tell because the real Dee was too stupid for me to notice that a zombie ate her goddamn brain?”

A pause, then she tilts her head, eyebrows creased with pity. “You know, Dennis, sometimes you talk like you spend every second of your spare time sitting around all by yourself, coming up with the weirdest, most complicated insults possible and memorizing them so you can whip one out like you just thought of it and people will think you’re cool and articulate and smart, but honestly? It just comes across as kind of pathetic.” 

“That’s ridiculous, I don’t do that,” Dennis says, making a mental note to delete that list he’s been keeping on his phone titled _Sick Burns_. “You’re just trying to change the subject because you _know_ you fucked up. You _know_ you shouldn’t have told Mac about the bet.”

“But I had to tell Mac about the bet,” Dee says, like it’s the most obvious thing ever. 

“You absolutely did _not_ have to tell Mac about the bet. You should have just told _me_.” __

_ _“Yeah, but…” She looks off to the side, chewing on her lip. _ _

_ __ _

__

“But what?”

“Well, I don’t…I don’t know,” Dee stammers. 

“You don’t _know_?!”

“I mean, obviously there’s a reason why I should have told Mac, or else Frank wouldn’t have said I couldn’t.”

“So you’re saying that you didn’t even _consider_ not telling him? You didn’t entertain a _single_ one of the billions of negative consequences that could come from telling him?”

“Okay, are you gonna keep shitting on me, or are you gonna explain what the big deal is? I mean, he didn’t blow it already, did he?”

“Not yet. But he’s going to. I mean, the way he’s acting—” 

“Ooh.”” Dee cringes. “He didn’t figure it out, did he?”

“No, he—wait.” A beat. “Figured what out?” 

“Y’know, that he wants to bang you,” she tosses out with a loose shrug.

In the Saturday morning cartoons Dennis and Dee used to watch when they were kids, sometimes a character, like Wile E. Coyote, would walk right off of a cliff and then he'd just keep walking, blissfully unaware that there was nothing beneath him. Only when he looked down would he finally succumb to gravity. 

So, from a very young age, Dennis learned that you can avoid falling from a great height if you aggressively believe that there is still something solid under your feet—and never, ever look down. 

Dennis forces himself to maintain eye contact with Dee and to keep his voice steady and emotionless. “What?” 

“Oh.” Dee blinks. “So…not that, then?”

There is solid ground beneath Dennis’s feet. He knows this. He will not look down to check. The universe will hold him up if he forces it to. 

He pushes out a icy laugh. “I’m sorry, Dee. I must have misheard you. I thought you just said that Mac wants to have sex with me.”

“Why are you acting like this is new information? We’ve talked about this before.”

“We’ve talked about Mac being _gay_. You’ve never said that you thought he was gay for _me_.”

“Oh. Huh. Really?”

“Trust me, I would have remembered you saying something as dumb as that.” 

“I guess it’s just so obvious that I figured it must’ve come up.”

“Well, it didn’t.” 

“Ah, come on.” She punches him playfully in the arm; he jerks away as though she’s contagious. “You don’t have to pretend you didn’t know. I mean, you’re not the one that should be embarrassed. He’s the one who—”

“Goddamn it, Dee, give me a second!” By the grace of god, she shuts up. Dennis closes his eyes and takes a few deep breaths and as he forces himself to consider the situation enough to think about it critically. 

As soon as he agreed to the bet, he started preparing himself to hear this sort of shit. Dennis was anticipating that Frank and Charlie would try to convince him that Mac had “feelings” for him in an attempt to “awaken” Dennis’s “feelings” for Mac. But Dee was supposed to be on _his_ side. 

Opening his eyes, Dennis zeroes in on her expression. She looks concerned, like she thinks he might be going insane—but there’s an undertone of amusement beneath it, just the hint of a smirk at the corners of her lips. And then he figures it out: Dee might be on his side in this scenario, but she is first and foremost, above all else, his sister. 

And what do sisters love to do more than anything else the world? 

Dennis concludes: “You’re fucking with me.” 

The smirk slides right off of Dee’s face; Dennis is almost surprised he doesn’t hear it splat when it hits the ground. “Did you _really_ not know about this?” she asks. 

“You _are_ fucking with me!” He’s much more at ease now that he’s figured out what she’s up to. He starts to laugh. “I mean, Mac? Wanting to bang _me_? That is the stupidest goddamn thing I’ve ever heard.”

“I’m sorry, are we in different dimensions or something? _What_ is going on here?” 

“I mean, sure, we all know Mac is gay, and we all know I’m hot, but just because a gay dude likes hanging out with a hot dude doesn’t mean he’s in love with him. That’s just—honestly, Dee, that’s just straight-up homophobic.”

“Oh for the love of—it’s not homophobic, dickwad. It’s accurate.” 

“Okay, sure, whatever you say, Dee.” 

Dee inspects him closely, like she’s looking for a lip tic, an eyebrow twitch, some kind of tell that would give him away. “I can’t believe you didn’t know this. I mean, you think everyone wants to have sex with you.”

“Okay, okay, hang on, not everyone.” Dennis stops laughing and puts up a hand to stop her, because she’s making him sound like some sort of narcissist and he needs to set the record straight. “I mean, sure, a lot of people do want to have sex with me. Yes, almost all women, and—I’m not ashamed to admit—a handful of men. But you can’t trick me into thinking that Mac is one of them.”

In addition to Saturday morning cartoons, another thing Dennis and Dee did to occupy their largely unsupervised free time was hide-and-seek. Unfortunately, Dee figured out pretty early on that she didn’t actually have to search for Dennis when they played hide-and-seek. She could just sit around until Dennis got so bored or uncomfortable that he ended up walking right out of his hiding spot. And if he could see her from wherever he was hiding, she would have this smug, self-satisfied look on her face like she was just waiting for reality (and Dennis) to catch up to the fact that she had already won. 

More than thirty years later and that look is exactly the same. Only the hiding places have changed. 

But even though Dennis truly isn’t hiding at all right now, the look still works just like it always has, and he begins to panic: “Goddamnit, if I thought Mac wanted to bang me, do you think I would’ve acted like—I mean, sure, fine, okay, maybe Mac and I have a _unique_ friendship. But he doesn’t—he isn’t—_we_ aren’t—we’re just close!” 

Dee keeps looking at Dennis with that stupid look and—goddamnit, he needs to get a hold of himself. He imagines slapping the teeth right out of her face. Making her wear dentures for the rest of her life. And she doesn’t have dental insurance, so they’d be shitty dentures, too. He leans into the anger, which feels much better than panic. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he spits. “What Mac and I have is not unusual. You just don’t know what it’s like to have friends.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know I don’t.” Dee waves that off. “But even I can tell that it’s a little weird for two grown men in their forties to tug the slug together together and never have any serious relationships with women and buy timeshares in Florida together.”

Dennis mumbles, “We didn’t actually _buy_ the timeshare…”

“Oooh, I guess that means you guys are totally normal then! My bad!” 

“Why did you even make the bet if you think Mac wants to bang me?!” 

“Well, it’s not like he’s ever gonna _admit_ it.”

“Jesus Christ,” Dennis says, running a hand through his hair. “Well. Thank god you’re an idiot and you’re dead wrong about the whole thing, because otherwise you could’ve _really_ shat the bed on this one.”

“How?” she challenges. “I mean, it takes two to tango, right? And you’re not into it, so. We’re good.” 

“Well—yeah, of course.” 

“Great. So. Now that that’s out of the way, wanna tell me why you dragged me in here?”

Dennis leans against the door and sighs, crossing his arms. “Oh, Mac is just, like, telling everyone he isn’t gay when no one’s talking about anything even remotely relevant.” 

“Oh,” Dee says. “Yeah, should’ve seen that one coming.” 

“Helpful,” Dennis snaps. 

“Well, why can’t you just. Y’know. Tell him to chill out?”

Dennis waits for her to say more. She doesn’t. “_That’s_ your suggestion?” he says in disbelief. “Just _tell_ him?”

“Yeah.”

“I can’t just _tell_ him! He’ll get pissed off and yell and dig his heels in even deeper!”

“So then pat his cheeks and call him ‘baby boy’ or something like you used to and he’ll be putty in your hands.”

“‘Like I used to’?” Dennis repeats, confused. “What are you talking about? I’ve never done that.” 

“Yeah, remember? After Charlie’s musical?” 

Oh. “Oh.” 

“You started calling him baby boy?”

“Yeah, I remember—”

“Because of the song?” 

“I said I—”

“‘Tiny boy, little boy, baby boy, I need—’”

“Yes, Dee! Goddamnit! I remember.”

“Right. So. Go do that.” She shoos him away with a flick of her hand. 

But Dennis stays right where he is. “Let me get this straight. First you tell me that you think Mac wants to bang me, and now you want me to _seduce_ him into not being homophobic.”

“Well that depends on if you count that as seduction, which I assume you don’t, since you used to do it all the time.” 

Dennis scowls, but says nothing. 

Dee senses his reluctance. “What, you think you’re gonna pat him on the face and then his dick is instantly gonna be in your ass?”

Ugh. Dennis hates it when Dee isn’t wrong. He grumbles, “What makes you think I’d be the bottom?”

“Dennis.” There’s that fucking _look_ again. “Come on.” 

“Don’t.” Dennis squeezes his eyes shut to avoid her gaze. Like she’s Medusa or something. “Just. Don’t.” 

Dee puts her hands up in surrender. “Just go talk to Mac, tell him to settle down. It’s gonna be fine, I didn’t fuck anything up, we got this.” 

In spite of everything, including himself, Dennis does find her words the tiniest bit comforting. “Okay, fine,” he relents. “But I’m _not_ doing the baby boy thing.”

“Suit yourself.”

“And if we lose this bet, I am going to kill you.” 

“Not if I kill you first, boner,” Dee says with a smile that’s far too sweet. 

* * *

As soon as the men’s room door clicks shut and they check in the stalls to make sure no one is eavesdropping, Mac asks Dennis, “What were you talking to Dee about?”

“It’s not important.”

“Don’t keep secrets from me, dude. This whole thing is already way too confusing.”

“I’m not keeping any secrets. It’s just not important.”

“Then why can’t you just tell me?”

“Because there are more pressing matters at hand that—” 

“Tell me or I leave.”

Dennis scoffs and gives Mac a humorless smile like Come On Dude Don’t Do This Right Now. 

When Dennis asked to meet in the bathroom, Mac told himself he wasn’t gonna lose his cool. This whole bet means nothing and so it’s not worth the energy. He wasn’t gonna let Charlie get inside his head. Still, Mac has enough self-respect to stand his ground. “Tell me.”

“No, Mac, we need to—” 

“Tell me.” Mac clenches his fists, but he’s got this. He’s gonna stay chill.

“We need—”

Actually, fuck that. “TELL ME TELL TELL ME TELL ME TELL ME TELL—”

“Jesus! Alright! Are you a goddamn toddler?” Mac shuts up and Dennis shakes his head in disgust. “I was just talking to her about you.”

“_Aha_! I knew it!” 

Dennis rolls his eyes. “No, you didn’t.” 

“No, I didn’t,” Mac concedes easily.

“But you should have. I mean, you almost blew the whole thing with Frank back there and the bet has barely started.”

__“Okay, well, actually I _did_ pick up that you were pissed off at me after that.”

“Oh, good job.”

“But I don’t know _why_ you’re pissed at me. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

Dennis eyebrows shoot up. “Are you kidding me? Mac, Frank was just telling us about going on a business trip to meet an investor—and out of nowhere, you start blabbering about how you’re not gay!” 

“It was not out of nowhere.”

“Oh, it _absolutely_ was.”

“No, it wasn’t. Frank, he—he _implied_—” Mac _knows_ that Frank implied he was gay, but now he can’t even remember anything Frank actually said. Ugh, his neck is getting hot.

“Right.” Dennis crosses his arms. “Well, even if he did imply something, don’t you think it’s safer to just leave the whole gay thing alone? Just for the weekend?”

“No, I don’t!”

Dennis’s nostrils flare. “That wasn’t actually a question, Mac.”

Oh, great, so now Dennis is gonna pull that subtext bullshit. “There was _clearly_ a question mark at the end there,” Mac insists.

“Yeah, technically, it was a question, but it was rhetorical. I didn’t actually want you to—“

“Oh my God, Dennis, could you please just use words that actually mean what you’re trying to tell me? Just use the English language as God intended it? Just for this weekend?” 

“Okay, Mac.” Dennis speaks really slowly, with far too much patience to actually be patient. “If you keep bringing up not being gay, then Frank and Charlie are going to wonder _why_ not being gay is on your mind so much. And can you tell me _why_ it’s on your mind so much?”__

Mac bites his lip, searches Dennis’s face for some kind of hint towards whatever answer he’s looking for. “Because...” 

Dennis prompts, “Because we know…”

“Because we know…”

“About…”

“About…the…”

Dennis lets the moment stretch out, clearly waiting for Mac to finish the sentence for him. 

Mac tries again. “We know about…about the…”

And then Dennis forms a loose fist and shakes it back and forth. 

Mac frowns at the gesture. “About the...masturbating?” 

“Masturb—what the fuck?! No! About the _bet_, Mac, goddamn it!”

“What was this, then!?” Mac cries, mimicking Dennis’s gesture. 

“It was dice!” Dennis repeats the move, harder and faster this time.

“This is _dice_?” Mac does the move too, even harder and faster, and this right time in Dennis’s face. 

Dennis shoves Mac’s fist away with one hand. “Like, shaking dice before you throw them!” He does the gesture one more time, presenting it with a flourish of his other hand like a pissed-off Vanna White. 

Mac just watches it for a second. “Dude, that _really_ looks like jacking off.”

“Well, you obviously just have dick on the brain,” Dennis dismisses. 

“No, _you_ have dick on the brain.” 

Mac glares at Dennis, who glares right back. A two-person Mexican standoff. In every way but physical, the theme song from _The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly_ echoes through the bathroom. 

Which smells terrible. Like piss and shit and something more sinister, something rotten. 

A bubble grows slowly on the surface of the Yuck Puddle until it bursts with a soft _plop_.

Dennis blinks first. “Look, Mac, we’ve gotta be on the same team here, ok?”

“Then don’t go talking about me behind my back!” 

“Fuck, Mac, calm down.” 

“I AM CALM!” 

Dennis sets his jaw. He seems to make a decision—he breathes out through his nostrils, heavy and quick. 

Then Dennis’s face goes instantly soft and kind (even the unchangeable features like his nose and jawline somehow seem less sharp) and he reaches up and he tentatively touches the (very warm and soft) palms of his hands to either side of Mac’s face. Dipping his head down so he can look Mac in the eye, the touch of his hands firmer now, Dennis coos, “It’s gonna be fine, okay, baby boy?”

It takes a couple of seconds for Mac to unfreeze himself. He takes a huge step backwards, leaving Dennis with hands still in the air like he’s holding an invisible bowling ball. “Uh, okay,” is all Mac can come up with.

Dennis just stands there, studying the space between his hands like the bowling ball was once visible but suddenly vanished from sight. “‘Okay’?” he repeats.

“Like, okay, I’ll try to, you know, be chill. About the—gay thing.”

“Oh.” Dennis flicks his gaze towards Mac, then drops his hands back to his sides. “That’s—good.”

“Just—don’t do that again.” And with that, Mac pushes away the whole conversation with an airy wave of his hand and heads towards the door, looking over his shoulder Dennis as he asks, “Hey, wanna do some shots?” 

With relief so strong you could bottle it and sell it to people over the age of 21, Dennis says, “Oh my _God_ yes,” and follows Mac out the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> <3 tumblr: @oystersaintforme (idk how to link to shit in the notes...)


	4. "Mac and Dennis Say Yes"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mac and Dennis arrive at the hotel for their business trip, and Frank and Charlie's scheme to get them to bang begins in earnest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PSA; DON'T mix Xanax with red wine. 
> 
> This chapter is a long one. I'm not sorry, but I am sorry that I'm not sorry. 
> 
> Also, I mentioned in the beginning that some other sitcom characters have inspired some "original" characters in this fic. This is because I'm bad at making up characters on my own. At any rate, those characters start appearing in this chapter. You absolutely don't need to know the shows they're from, but if you do, then then it's fun little easter egg for you. :)
> 
> Finally: please please please let me know about typos! I really want to fix them.

_Previously, on Lost…_

After learning about the bet, Mac and Dennis try to set their minds straight about the whole thing, but only succeed in getting confused by Dee (who tells Dennis that Mac wants to bang him), Charlie (who tells Mac that Dennis wants to bang him), and each other (because they’re thoroughly mixed up by this point, and also unaware that they’re gay as hell). Oh, and Dennis (at Dee's suggestion) tries to seduce Mac into not being too defensive about the gay thing. It doesn't go well, leaving Dennis pretty embarrassed. And also confused. Just, like, a lot of confusion.

_And that’s what you missed on Glee!_

* * *

They take off for the Poconos the next morning with Dennis feeling pleasantly and unusually calm. At least some of that has to do with the fact that he actually had a good night’s sleep for the first time in months, but mostly he’s just more prepared, because Dee had done some recon by checking Frank’s credit card transactions, text messages, e-mails, and voicemails.

Of course, Dennis wasn’t as impressed by that as Dee clearly wanted him to be. Frank’s stuff was ridiculously easy to hack. His password for all of his accounts is still _paddyspub_, and his PIN for everything has been the same for as long as Dennis can remember: _6969_. But at least now he and Mac know some stuff about what’s in store for them, and if Dennis learned anything from those GI Joe cartoons he watched in the ’80s, it’s that knowing is half the battle.

So here’s what they know. First of all, the investor they’re meeting, some dude named Michael Malone, is a legit investor, revealed by his LinkedIn profile. Which means that this Michael guy might actually want to invest in Paddy’s. Or he might just be some shady rich dude who owes Frank a favor. Doesn’t matter either way, because Mac and Dennis are confident they can wow him and get him to invest enough money in the bar to allow them to fire Frank and take back his shares. This feels justified, given, well, everything Frank has ever done.

The other useful piece of information is that Frank purchased five surveillance cameras that will transmit to Dee’s laptop, which Frank and Charlie are using because she’s the only one of them that owns a working laptop. By reading a series of text messages with the hotel manager, they deduced that there’s going to be a camera in the hotel restaurant (Serrano’s), one in the hotel lobby, one in their room, one in their bathroom, and one in an unclear location. So Mac and Dennis are going to be tracked pretty much the whole time, which would suck, and they wouldn’t even be able to talk. 

Dee, being the idiot she is, suggested making it so her laptop couldn’t play any sound. Dennis dismissed that idea immediately. Then Mac suggested disabling the speakers on Dee’s laptop, which was genius. 

Dee got inexplicably pissed off after that, for some reason. Probably on her period or something. So Dennis popped in one of Dee’s old VHS recordings of _Law & Order_ from when Jerry Orbach was still alive; Detective Lenny Briscoe is like Xanax to her. Then, just for good measure, he crushed up some actual Xanax, sprinkled it in her wine, let her pass out on the couch, and helped himself to the free bed for the night. Hence the good night’s sleep. 

He made Mac sleep on the floor as usual, because the idea of sharing a bed with him had seemed inadvisable at the time. Now, however, in the cold light of day, Dennis can see just how stupid he was being. If Mac really wanted to bang him, then he would _want_ Dennis to touch him. And he doesn’t. Dennis is honestly embarrassed he even considered it.

It’s just after one in the afternoon when Mac and Dennis pull into the parking lot of Hotel Huis Clos, rock salt crunching under the tires as the car slows down. They climb out of the Range Rover and Mac stretches his arms above his head, letting out a loud, satisfied, borderline-sexual groan that makes Dennis want to apologize on Mac’s behalf to the handful of people lingering outside the hotel’s entrance.

“Damn,” Mac says, taking in the hotel (which he keeps pronouncing as “Hughie’s Clothes”) as he pulls their overnight bags out of the back seat, his nose wrinkled and mouth slightly open. “This place is fancy, huh?”

The heavy glass front doors lead to a lobby that is reminiscent of an alpine ski lodge, with wooden walls and vaulted ceilings. The girl sitting behind the check-in desk is aloof when Dennis gives her his name and his driver’s license. She spends about three minutes on the computer typing and clicking—Mac gets bored and starts fiddling with little dish of peppermints—before she slides two keys across the chest-high counter. “Alright, here’s your keys. Room 417. And management wants me to tell you that we have a rare discount on a sensual couple’s massage at our world-class spa.”

She says the words like they’re the most boring thing in the world, which is entirely at odds with the vertigo that they slap Dennis in the face with. 

In the bathroom last night, he and Mac had only briefly discussed about what to do in a situation like this. But if Dennis is being candid, he didn’t think the situation would come up. Have people assumed he and Mac were a couple before? Sure. But it’s not as though it’s a constant issue. Like, if Dennis were to make a pie chart comparing the amount of time he’s spent correcting people about the nature of his relationship with Mac to the amount of time he’s spent doing everything else—well, the pie chart would just look like a solid circle. You wouldn’t even be able to _see_ the teeny tiny slice of time he’s spent saying shit like _Do I_ look _like the kind of man who would date someone who wears Hawaiian shirts?_

So, after their argument in the men’s room the night before, they hadn’t returned to the subject. He had told Mac to be chill about the gay thing, and surely that would be enough.

But now, standing there in the lobby of Hotel Huis Clos and beginning to sweat in his heavy winter coat, Dennis is remembering Mac is dumber than a bag of hammers and usually needs to be told things at least three times before he actually understands them. And as the front desk chick picks up the dime-a-dozen paperback thriller she had her nose in when they first came in, Dennis fully expects Mac to forget everything they had discussed the night before and braces himself for the inevitable explosion.

Which never comes.

A glance at Mac reveals that the fuse hasn’t even been lit. Instead, his jaw is clenched with focused determination, and he’s still fiddling with the mints. Goddamn it. Leave it to Mac to take orders so seriously he that he overshoots in the opposite direction. Well, at least this is an opportunity for Dennis to give Mac a much-needed lesson on the art of subtlety.

The front desk chick turns a page in her book. Dennis clears his throat and flashes a charming grin when she looks up at him blankly.

“Can I help you?”

“A couple’s massage sounds great, uh, Stevie,” Dennis reads from the nametag pinned to her shirt. He frowns. “Hm. Weird name for a girl.”

“Thanks. What time do you wanna schedule it for?”

“Well, that depends, Stevie,” Dennis purrs as he leans his elbows on the counter, biting his lip and bowing his head low to look up at her through his lashes with bedroom eyes. “What time are you free?”

Stevie snickers in response, then stands and adds a tally mark to a large collection of them on a whiteboard hanging on the wall behind her. She recaps the marker with a decisive _click_, returns to her stool, and picks up the paperback she had been reading when they first walked in. “Anything else I can help you with?”

Dennis gestures at the whiteboard with his chin. “What’s with that?”

“Oh, that? That’s just a count I’m keeping of how many times a male customer has asked me to do a couple’s massage with him after I tell them about the special.”

Dennis quickly counts the tallies. “Almost thirty times?”

“Thirty-three.”

That seems like a lot. “What, is that like, over the course of a year?”

“Two months.”

“Two months?!” Dennis cries. That can’t be right. “You’re not even that hot!”

“Then why did you ask to have a couple’s massage with me?” she asks, innocently cocking her head.

“I—because—”

She clicks her tongue with sarcastic reproach as she returns to her book. “And in front of your boyfriend, too.” She says it more to the book than to them; but it’s loud enough to hear.

_Still_ Mac refuses to look anywhere but the apparently endlessly fascinating bowl of mints. Clenching his fists, Dennis turns back to Stevie. “He’s not my boyfr—”

In an instant, Mac’s arm is wrapped around Dennis’s shoulders, squeezing tight enough to hurt. “We prefer the term lovers actually!” Mac says, fast and far too loud.

“_The fuck are you doing_?” Dennis hisses at him through clenched teeth.

Thankfully, Stevie doesn’t appear to give a shit; in fact, she might actually give less of a shit than any person Dennis has ever met, which earns her his begrudging respect. “Do you want the couple’s massage or not?” she asks, still focused on her book.

“We’ll think about it,” Mac says. “C’mon, hotstuff!” Jesus Christ. So much for subtlety. 

Mac grabs the keys off the counter with one hand and Dennis’s wrist with the other, and then Dennis is being pulled towards the elevator before he has a chance to say another word. 

* * *

Room 417 turns out to have a major problem, and Dennis feels like an idiot. “We really should’ve seen this coming, huh,” he says.

“I didn’t even know they _put_ beds that small in hotel rooms.”

“They don’t. Clearly this is a Frank-and-Charlie thing.”

“Great.” Mac scans the room. “They’re probably watching us right now over their stupid cameras, laughing their heads off.”

“Well, let’s go ask for a different room.” Dennis heads towards the door. “With _two_ beds.”

“Wait, but isn’t that gonna raise an eyebrow, if we ask for a room with two beds as lovers?”

Dennis stops and whips around. “We _aren’t_ lovers, Mac.”

“I know that! But I thought we were supposed to be chill about the gay thing.”

“_That’s_ what that was?” Dennis squawks in disbelief. “Mac, there is a _huge_ amount of middle ground between being chill about the gay thing and telling people that we’re _lovers_. Which, by the way—I mean, _lovers_? Really? Could you have picked a grosser term?”

After a pause, Mac offers, “Bone bros?”

Dennis stares.

After another pause, Mac tries, “Nut buds?”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Oh! Cum chums!”

Dennis briefly begs for death, then inhales slowly and pulls his voice down somewhere low, controlled, and sharp. “Mac, for the love of all that is holy on earth, I am _begging_ you to stop.”

“You’re the one that asked for grosser terms,” Mac mutters petulantly.

“Oh, okay, well, since we’re on the subject of people asking for things they didn’t want—I thought you said no pet names and touching and stuff.”

“I did.” 

“So then what the fuck was all that shit down in the lobby, _hotstuff_?”

“I don’t know!” Mac holds his hands palms-up, backed into a corner and totally helpless. “You told me to be chill, so I panicked!”

“Oh my god, you are useless.”

“_I’m_ useless? I was _covering_ for you! _You’re_ the one that broke the rules!” 

“I beg your pardon? What rules am I meant to have broken?”

“You tried to tell that chick I wasn’t your boyfriend!”

“You’re _not_ my boyfriend!”

“I know that!”

“Then why are you yelling at me?!”

“I don’t know!”

“So then why—oh Jesus Christ they’re in our heads.”

The tension doesn’t break so much as it wilts and fades away, like a timelapse of something rotting, and Mac drags a hand down his face. He looks exhausted already and they only just got here. “Shit. How did we let that happen?” he groans.

Dennis rubs his forehead with his knuckles, feeling dazed. “I don’t know. I guess we’re not as prepared as we thought. But hey, this is not a situation we find ourselves in every day. It’s totally valid that we’re a little bit confused.” 

Mac heaves a huge sigh of relief. “Oh, dude, you’re confused too? I thought it was just me. I don’t know which way is up.” 

“Yeah, man. We’re in new territory here, scheme-wise, so, you know, let’s be easy on ourselves.”

“Right,” Mac says. “We don’t have to beat ourselves off over this.”

A pause. “‘Up’?”

Mac looks up at the ceiling. “Huh?”

“No, dude, the phrase is ‘beat ourselves _up_.’”

“That’s what I said.”

“No, you said—never mind. Doesn’t matter. Let’s just—let’s center ourselves.” Dennis widens his stance, closes his eyes, and takes a deep breath. “Frank, Dee, Charlie—you know, the Crab People—they’re all out of it. Reason will prevail.”

“Reason will prevail,” Mac repeats solemnly. 

“So. What would _Normal_ Mac and Dennis do in this situation? What would _Normal_ Mac and Dennis do if they walked into a hotel room with only one twin bed?”

The answer is obvious.

* * *

“Ah, shit,” Charlie says, hunched in front of the laptop. “What did I tell you? Operation Dorm Room was too much. They’re just gonna go get another room. We don’t have surveillance in any of the other rooms! I guess I’m gonna have to, like, hide under the bed and—oh, god. Frank, what if the bed collapses on me while they’re banging? I don’t even have a bucket list!”

“Cool it, alright? Jeez. They’re not gonna get another room.”

“Why else would they leave?” Charlie points at the screen. “Look! They are _literally walking out the door._”

“Don’t worry. I paid off the broad at the front desk. You grease a coupla palms, you get what you need.” 

“Really? How much did you give her?” 

“Don’t worry about it.” 

“Shit. First the surveillance equipment, then this piece of shit van—I just feel like this prank is costing us a lot of money.” 

“It’s not costin’ _us_ a lot of money, it’s costin’ _me_ a lot of money. And I got the money. Don’t you worry about the money, alright?” 

“It’s not about the money, dude, it’s just—it doesn’t have to be this complicated. If you just let me do the—” 

“If you mention the wallet thing one more time—” 

“It’d work!” 

“I don’t wanna have this conversation again. That’s a terrible idea and you know it.” 

“You don’t _get_ Mac and Dennis like I do, okay? If anyone knows how to get them to hump, it’s me.” 

“Then why haven’t you?” 

“Well, I didn’t give a shit until they left me out of their cream pie scheme.” 

Frank wrinkles his nose at that. “You’re not tellin’ me you’re jealous, are ya? You wanna pound off with ’em too?” 

“No, dude, I mean, like—if they had just told me what they were doing, I could’ve helped them out. I get why they didn’t tell _you_, you’re terrible. Me, though? I could’ve distracted Dee. I’m very good at distracting Dee! But they _didn’t_ tell me, and you know why?” He doesn’t give Frank time to answer before he says, “Exactly! Because they’re _ashamed_, which means Ol’ Charlie Kelly is currently coming in second to Shame in terms of Best Friendship, which obviously will _not_ stand, which is why I’m trying to restore my title as First Best Friend, _which in turn_ brings me back to my original point, which is that you should listen to me because I really do have a lot of expertise in this arena.” 

Frank stares at Charlie blankly, mouth hanging open, a thin string of drool stretching toward the floor of the van. 

“Hello!” Charlie snaps his fingers in front of Frank’s face, and he blinks and gives himself a good shake. 

“Sorry, I fell asleep. What were you saying?” 

“I just—I know how Mac and Dennis work,” Charlie summarizes with a frustrated huff. The drool should’ve been a hint. 

“You don’t know how _anyone_ works. You’ve barked at people at the grocery store twice in the last week.” 

“Of course I barked at people in the grocery store! What, you think I’m gonna just let everyone cut us in line at the deli counter?!” 

“I keep tellin’ ya, they’re not cuttin’ us. They’ve got this whole system where you take a number—” 

“Oooh, _numbers_!” Charlie wiggles his fingers in the air with mock awe. “Yeah, right. Like they’re gonna make you be some kind of math wizard just to buy pork chops. Come on, Frank. If you’re gonna lie, at least be reasonable.” 

“My point is, you’re not really, totally, all-the-way _human_.” 

“Hey!” 

“Don’t take it personally, okay? I mean, god knows it’s why I love ya. But it’s not gonna help us out here, because the truth is that you don’t understand the way normal people work and that’s why your little wallet thing is a bad idea.” 

“But _why_? You’re questioning the integrity of the witness but ignoring the hard evidence. You keep saying it’s terrible but you still haven’t said why.” 

“It’s just not them. It’s too…romantic.” 

“Then what’s with Operation Choking Hazard, huh?” Charlie challenges. “That’s like the most romantic thing a person can do.” 

“Yeah, if it’s real, which it’s not gonna be. And they’ll _know_ it’s not. And anyway, it’s only to get ’em started makin’ out. Operation Dorm Room is just plan B. Then there’s Operation Kiss of the Woman Spider, which is Plan C. And then Plan D is Operation Criminal Mischief, but I doubt things’ll come to that, because once Mac and Dennis make physical contact, boom!—the sexual floodgates’ll burst open and they’ll be bangin’ before they can say ‘powerbottom.’” 

“Man, it’s like you’re just trying to get them to have sex.” 

“’Course I am! That was the bet!” Frank cries, face screwed up like it does when he’s so confused he’s almost offended. “What have _you_ been trying to do?” 

“I’m trying to get them to realize they’re in love! I thought that was the whole thing!” 

“‘In love’? What the hell does ‘in love’ have to do with anything?” 

“Uh, because some people like having sex with the person they’re in love with? So once Mac and Dennis realize they’re in love, then they’ll bang, and then we win the bet? Come on, Frank, keep up.” 

Frank peers over the top of his glasses, looking seriously concerned for Charlie’s mental health. “Oh, Charlie. Mac and Dennis are not in love.” 

“What?” Charlie laughs, not sure if Frank is joking. “Dude, are we talking about the same Mac and Dennis?” 

“Shit. You are _way_ more out of touch with reality than I thought.” 

“Me? I’m out of touch with reality?” 

“I’m thinkin’ we might gotta go to a headshrink when we get back to Philly.” 

“Uh, excuse you, dude, but I’m perfectly sane, thank you very much. And if you just let me do the wallet thing, I can—” 

“No.” 

“Well, can it at least be Plan D?” 

“No!” 

“…Plan E?” 

“No! Jesus H., you’re gettin’ on my nerves.” Frank gestures to the cooler they brought with a pissed-off flick of his wrist. “Why don’t you have some lunchmeat and maybe you’ll calm down.” 

Scowling, Charlie fishes around in the cooler, fully stocked with cold cuts and beer, and pulls out a Coors and some ham. And when Frank isn’t looking, Charlie locates a packet wrapped in tinfoil and buried deep under the ice, opens it, and scarfs down a handful of his secret emergency cheese, lactose intolerance and Frank be damned.

* * *

“Jesus, that chick was a _bitch_,” Mac mutters while Dennis unlocks the door to room 417.

“I know. Like we’re supposed to believe there’s not a single vacancy in the entire hotel.”

Once inside, they drop their bags on the floor and finally divest themselves of their heavy winter coats. Dennis approaches the bed and sits down on it cautiously, testing the mattress out by bouncing on it a little. “So,” he says. “How are we gonna do this? Maybe you sleep on the floor?”

“Why do _I_ have to sleep on the floor?”

“Because of my delicate constitution, dude,” Dennis says, honestly a little hurt that Mac didn’t remember.

“I have a delicate constitution, too, bro!”

“Okay, okay, easy now,” Dennis placates. “Listen—what if we did shifts? You know? Two hours on the floor, two hours on the bed, we switch off?” 

Mac gives that a thought. “Yeah, that could work.”

“Or…” Dennis starts. 

“Or?” 

“_Or_ we could just both sleep on the bed. Hear me out,” Dennis adds quickly before Mac can say anything. “We’re trying to do what Normal Mac and Dennis would do, right? And, I mean, if Normal Mac and Dennis had to share a twin bed, what would happen? Like, sexually?”

“Well—nothing.”

“Nothing at all, right?” Dennis agrees. “Like, what, Frank and Charlie really think that if we just share one stupid bed for one stupid night, we’ll somehow be unable to resist making passionate gay love fueled by twenty-five years unresolved sexual tension or something?” Dennis has to laugh.

“Yeah, right? So stupid,” Mac laughs too. 

“Also—think about how pissed off they’ll be when we sleep in the same bed and _nothing happens_.”

Mac grins at the thought. “Okay. Fine. We’ll share the bed.”

Dennis stands up from the bed. “Alright. Next item on the agenda: clearly, we’re having some communication problems. I’m not denying that. And the way I see it, the big issue is that we keep saying ‘no’ to each other.”

“Oh, I’m not gonna just let you take the lead, if that’s where this is—”

“No, no. We’re _both_ going to take the lead.”

“How does that work?”

“It’s like, whatever one of us throws out there, we just go with it. We say ‘yes.’ Understand?”

“Yes.”

“Alright, explain it to me.”

“Oh, I don’t actually understand. I just thought I was supposed to say ‘yes.’”

“No, not right _now_, you—Jesus. Okay. I’ll give you an example: if someone thinks we’re—I don’t know, like, Italian, and I say, ‘No we’re not,’ then you would also say, ‘No we’re not.’ _But_ if someone thinks we’re Italian and you say, ‘Yes we are,’ then I _also_ say, ‘Yes we are.’ Whoever gets to the answer first, no matter the answer, the other one just goes with it. Builds on it. Fully commits. Make sense?”

“Yeah,” Mac cocks his head, warming up to the idea. “Yeah. I think so. You’re talking about, like, teamwork.”

“Yes!” Dennis grins. “It’s us versus them, bro. You and me against the world.” 

Mac nods, then offers: “_Top Gun_ high five?”

“I think the situation calls for it,” Dennis allows judiciously.

It’s undeniably the best one they’ve pulled off in years. 

* * *

Mac is lying on the stupid bed, watching the kind of television he only watches when the wifi in Dee’s apartment is being shitty so Netflix won’t load and he has to resort to watching cable.

After a while, Dennis comes out of the bathroom, where he’s spent the better part of the last hour getting ready. Buttoning the cuffs of his shirt, he nods at the TV. “What is this, _That 70s Show_?” 

“Yeah,” Mac says. “There’s not really anything else on.” 

“Remember when this show ended and they tried to make an 80s version?”

“No,” Mac frowns. “Not at all. When did that happen?”

“I dunno, 2003? Anyway, it sucked. There just wasn’t as much weed in the 80s.”

“True. It was more of a cocaine decade,” Mac agrees.

“Which is not as funny of a drug. So the show wasn’t funny either. Even though the lead was like super handsome.”

“Who was the lead?”

“Oh, just some bullshit prettyboy theater kid who went to some fancy acting school or something.”

Mac scoffs. “Like you gotta go to _school_ to learn how to act in a sitcom.”

“Right?” Dennis laughs. “He was handsome, though, I’ll give him that. You should get dressed for dinner, dude. We’re gonna be late.” 

Confused, Mac looks down at his polo and tie. “I am dressed.”

Dennis shakes his head. “All right, whatever. Let’s head out.” 

Whatever weirdness Mac might have been feeling the night before has disappeared completely. He can hardly even remember why he was worried, because now he’s feeling pretty goddamn pumped. There might be nothing in the world he loves more than being in cahoots. Well, okay, maybe he loves Jesus more, but cahoots is a close second. You could even say he loves Jesus _because_ he and Jesus are in cahoots, so cahoots might still be number one. 

Honestly, it doesn’t even matter who he’s in cahoots _with_. He’s even liked being in cahoots with Dee the few times it’s happened, and he hates her. But being in cahoots with _Dennis _is the absolute best. They’ve just got chemistry when it comes to cahoots. 

As soon as they walk through the door of the restaurant, Mac automatically clocks all the exits: three of them—the door they came in, an emergency exit by the kitchen, and a door that leads out onto a patio, which may or may not have stairs to the ground below that’s about 20 feet below it. Doesn’t matter, though. Mac could jump off if he had to, do a sweet tuck-and-roll, and—

“Mac!” Dennis waves a hand in front of his face. “Hello! Pay attention! What are you doing?”

“Ocular assessment. What’s up?”

Dennis sets his jaw like I’m Just Going To Pretend You Didn’t Say That. “Do you see this Michael guy?” he asks. 

Mac scans the room again. “I kinda forget what he looks like.”

“Uh—he has white hair.” 

Mac keeps looking. “Lotta people with white hair in here right now.”

“Yeah, well, it’s 4 pm. That’s dinnertime for old people.” Dennis consults his phone. “Frank said he be wearing a red bowtie.” 

“Did he say anything else?”

“No, just a red bowtie.”

Mac scans the restaurant again. “I don’t see any naked dudes in here.”

A heavy sigh from Dennis. “I think he’s probably wearing other clothes too, bud.” 

“Oh. 10-4.” Commence third and final retinal scan. Mac zeroes in on a guy with a dark red bowtie sitting at the bar and points. “Him.”

Dennis slaps Mac’s hand down. “Don’t point,” he says, and turns to fully face Mac. He busies himself with fixing Mac’s tie (which totally wasn’t crooked, Dennis is just fussy) and says, “Now, remember—Michael might be a plant, but he is a real investor. So we should put in some real effort here.”

“And say yes to each other?”

“And say yes to each other,” Dennis confirms. He smooths out the collar of Mac’s polo. “You ready?”

Mac nods, and they stride up to the bar. 

“Excuse me, sir, are you Michael Malone, by any chance?” Dennis asks.

The man lifts his head up from his drink—a gin and tonic, by the looks of it—and regards them. His expression is unreadable. “Who wants to know?” 

“Uh—” Dennis stutters, caught off guard for a half a second. 

Then the man breaks out in a bright smile. “I’m just messing with you, Dennis!” he says, shaking Dennis’s hand. “And you must be Mac.” 

* * *

They sit at a little circular table near the windows. Michael is very friendly and asks them all about how their trip up was, how their room is. After a waiter comes by to take their order, Michael clasps his hands together on top of the table and leans toward them. “So,” he says. “Let’s get down to business. Frank has told me a bit about you two and your dive-bar aesthetic you’ve got going on—brilliant angle, by the way—but I want to hear the whole story from you two.”

“Oh, uh, gosh,” Mac says, uncertain of the direction he should go in. _Brilliant angle_? What the hell does that mean?

Dennis’s laugh sounds as uneasy as Mac feels. “Well, you know, where to begin?”

“Start from the beginning!” Michael leans back in his chair and sweeps a hand towards them, urging them to talk. “How did you two meet?”

Dennis begins, “Uh, we met in high school, and—”

“Oh!” Michael interrupts with an excited gasp like he just saw a puppy, and puts a hand to his cheek. “High school sweethearts!”

Ah. There it is. 

“Right…high school sweethearts.” Dennis speaks like he’s sounding out foreign words. 

“And you’re _still _together? That is—well, that just completely renews my faith in romance!” 

After a quick glance at Dennis, Mac says, “Oh, well, we didn’t actually start _dating_ in high school.” 

“Right,” says Dennis. “Which is probably a good thing, considering how dramatic I was back then.” 

“Oh, please,” Mac rolls his eyes fondly. “You never _stopped_ being that dramatic.”

Michael claps his hands with delight. .“Ooh, banter! My goodness, you two are _cuuute_.” He somehow stretches the word “cute” into two syllables. “So how _did_ you get together?”

“Well, we—we, uh, got an apartment together after I graduated from UPenn.” 

“And after I graduated from the police academy,” Mac adds, because Dennis has to Say Yes.

And, to Mac’s delight, he does. “Yes, uh, Frank may have mentioned that Mac was a Philadelphia police officer for a few years? But then he got shot in the line of duty, so he retired from the force early.” 

Michael gasps dramatically. “No, Frank never mentioned that. How terrible!”

Mac looks at Dennis wide-eyed like Whoa Dude That’s So Badass. Dennis tips his head ever-so-slightly towards him like Sure Thing Bro, then continues weaving a web of complete lies: “So, yeah, we were just roommates for a while, we hung out all the time, never found the same kind of emotional satisfaction in any of our relationships with women as we did with each other, one thing led to another, yada yada yada, you’ve seen _Seinfeld_—and the rest is history!” Dennis leans back with a charmingly humble shrug.

Excited to add more to the story, Mac says, “I mean, of course, I always had a little crush on him in high school.”

Dennis doesn’t seem to want to say yes to that. “You did?” he asks, and he looks genuinely confused. 

“Yeah, babe,” Mac laughs, trying to smooth over Dennis’s too-spiky reaction. He reaches out and gives Dennis’s shoulder a gentle squeeze. “You knew that.” 

Dennis glances first down at Mac’s hand on his shoulder, then at Michael out of the corner of his eye, and then seems to remember himself. It’s like a switch flips, and Dennis jokes, “Right, I knew. Of course I _knew_. I just didn’t know _you_ knew.”

“Ah, yes,” Michael shakes his head with a sad smile, as though he’s reliving a memory of his own. “Well, we were all closet cases in high school, weren’t we? I mean, when I was in high school, I was in love with my best friend, right? But I didn’t _know_ it. So I just went out with literally all of his ex-girlfriends. I mean, can you believe that? _How_ did I not put two and two together?” 

“Ha!” Dennis’s chair creaks as he shifts in it uncomfortably. “I don’t know, man!”

Michael chuckles, rolling his eyes at his former self. “I even slept with his prom date!”

Mac spits out his drink.

* * *

Aside from that little awkward moment (which probably only happened because Frank gave Michael insider info), the rest of the lunch is going off without a goddamn hitch. Michael _loves_ them, Mac and Dennis. He thinks every single thing they do and say is “adorable,” and even though that’s not a word anyone should ever use to describe Mac (he’s ruggedly handsome if anything, not _cute_), it sure seems to be winning them points. 

It turns out Michael’s whole thing is investing in businesses owned by the gays, and he’s loving the sound of Paddy’s. (“I mean, a gay dive bar? It’s genius. Dive bars serve a very specific purpose. Everyone needs a dive bar at some time in their lives. Why shouldn’t Philly’s LGBT community have one to call their own?”) Obviously, Paddy’s is not owned by the gays, but hey, if some rich dude wants to give them a metric shitload of money because he _thinks_ they’re gay, well, Mac’s not above that. Gay for pay, right? That’s something Mac’s heard before. That’s a totally legit business strategy.

“Well, I have to say, I really like you two,” Michael says, dabbing at his mouth with a cloth napkin and then dropping it on the table next to the plate of chocolate cake remnants. “Well, I’m going to go right ahead and say it: I want to invest in Paddy’s Pub.”

Dennis and Mac exchange a look like Holy Shit Frank Is Gonna Be So Pissed This Is Fucking _Awesome_.

“Really?” Dennis says. “That’s terrific!” 

Just then, their waiter stops by. “Pardon me, sirs. An anonymous patron sent these to you.” He sets down three champagne flutes, one in front of each of them. 

“Oh, how lovely!” Michael exclaims. “I wonder who sent them?” 

“Enjoy,” the waiter says, and then he fucking _winks_ at Dennis before waltzing off. 

Mac looks at Dennis like Did He Just Wink At You?

Dennis looks at Mac like Did He Just Wink At Me?

“I suppose a celebration _is_ in order, after all,” Michael says as he holds up his champagne flute. “Cheers!”

They all clink their glasses together. Mac sips hesitantly at first to make sure the champagne doesn’t taste like poison or whatever. It tastes fine, though—really good, actually—so he tips the glasses back. And then he flinches when something hard and metallic hits his front teeth. He sneaks a peek inside the champagne flute, and the sight makes his stomach drop: a bunch of bubbles clinging to a plain gold ring resting in the bottom of the glass. 

Adrenaline starts pumping through Mac’s limbs and he snaps his eyes up to Dennis, who is holding his champagne flute up to the light, inspecting it like some hoity-toity somalian and not paying any attention to Mac. 

Maybe Mac can just brush this under the rug? Maybe he can, like, swallow the ring and pretend not to notice? Frank and Charlie would be so pissed if he did that, which would be hilarious—

But then he notices a bunch of the restaurant staff clumping together by the door to the kitchen, watching their table with quiet excitement, some of them covering their mouths to hide huge grins. One of them is even tearing up. Conclusion: the staff is in on it. Goddamnit. 

Under the table, Mac subtly nudges Dennis’s foot with his own. 

Dennis shifts his eyes from his champagne down to Mac with an annoyed huff. 

Mac raises his eyebrows significantly at Dennis, then, without moving his head at all, slides his eyes down towards his champagne flute and then back up to Dennis. 

Dennis follows Mac’s gaze and looks at Mac’s champagne flute, then back up to Mac with an almost imperceptible frown. He doesn’t see the ring.

Mac gives the subtlest jerk of his head in the direction of the crowd of waiters. 

Dennis gives a big fake stretch and pretends like he’s casually looking around the room, and Mac watches his frown get deeper when he registers the crowd by the kitchen. He still doesn’t get it. 

So Mac coughs quietly and pushes his champagne flute towards Dennis by a fraction of an inch, keeping his own eyes fixed somewhere out the window. 

Dennis looks at the champagne flute one more time and Mac knows exactly when he finally spies the ring, because his forehead starts twitching, probably from the effort of keeping his eyebrows from skyrocketing right off his face.

“What is that?” Ah, shit. Now _Michael_ sees the ring. Now it’s _really_ too late to get out of this. Michael leans in to get a closer look, then pulls back with a dramatic gasp. “Is that what I think it is?” he asks softly. 

The handful of other patrons in the restaurant are starting to take notice, too. It’s far too quiet and their little table is the center of attention.

Finally, Dennis drags his eyes up from the ring and gives Mac the tiniest shrug like Might As Well. So Mac chugs the champagne, catches the ring between his teeth, and spits it out into his palm. 

Some chick in the distance coos, “Oh my god!”

Mac holds up the ring between his thumb and forefinger. It’s not anything fancy, just a simple gold band, (but definitely not real gold because Frank is cheap) and Mac can’t think of anything to say because he’s never been proposed to before. His heart is beating harder and harder and he desperately tries to think of what people do when they get proposed to in movies and stuff and realizes that it’s usually the girls that get proposed to and they usually scream or cry so _that’s_ not going to happen.

Fortunately for Mac, he doesn’t end up having to think of anything to say, because when he looks up again, their waiter is handing Dennis a microphone.

A song begins to play over the speaker system, jazzy and brassy and slow, and Mac recognizes it immediately. 

Dennis does too. His eyes light up and he leaps to his feet, completely forgetting about the situation at hand, clearly just thrilled to have the opportunity to sing in front of a crowd. He stands up and starts crooning: “You’re just too good to be true…can’t take my eyes off of you…” 

The song is the one from that chick flick that Dee tricked the gang into seeing at the movie theater by telling them they were going to see _The Matrix_, the movie where Heath Ledger sings this song to that girl from _The Bourne Identity_ on the bleachers of the high school. The movie is total garbage, but the song…well, the song is a fucking _heater_. It starts all quiet and shmoopy and boring, but then it hits you with this jazzy brass section and the singer belts out the chorus and you wonder how people in the 1950s didn’t absolutely lose their goddamn minds when they first heard it. 

Mac can never remember the name of the song, but it’s made an appearance on many of his and Dennis’s driving-to-work mixes, because Dennis likes singing it and Mac likes dancing to it and punching up the beat by drumming on the dashboard. But it’s not, like, “their” song. It’s just that it’s a driving-to-work mixtape song and no one else commutes to work with them because no one else lives with them. But even though it’s not “their” song, Dennis is sure selling it like it is, making a complete ass of himself and just really cheesing it up. At the second verse, Dennis falls to his knees in front of Mac and reaches a hand up to caress his face: “_But if you feel like I feel, please let me know that it’s real…You’re just too good to be true…Can’t take my eyes off of you…_” 

When the song hits the fast jazzy brass part, Dennis jumps up on to his feet and takes a giant leap backwards and really gives it his all, swinging his hips from side-to-side like a ’50s rock’n’roll heartthrob, and then he leans back, scrunches his face up, and belts out the chorus: “_I WANT YOU BAAAAABY, ANDIFIT’SQUITEALRIGHT I NEED YOU BAAAAABY, TOWARMTHELONELYNIGHTS I LOVE YOU BAAAAABY, TRUST IN ME WHEN I SAAAAAY…_” 

Dennis isn’t even singing to Mac anymore, hamming it up for the audience instead, and Mac wouldn’t have expected anything different. Sweaty, hair a mess, shirt untucked, Dennis is downright ugly right now. Mac knows that there are a million reasons why Dennis should want to die of shame, and another million reasons why Mac should too. In spite of all of that, though, Mac finds that he can’t stop grinning, a laugh caught in the back of his throat. Dennis catches his eye and gives him (just him) a little conspiratorial eyebrow waggle like We’re Totally Fooling These Idiots. 

A thought thinks itself in Mac’s head, fully formed and glowing: _I get to remember this_. Tomorrow, the two of them will go back to Philly and everything will return to normal, but this will always be something that happened. Something they did _together_. 

The second part of the chorus kicks in, and Dennis runs up to Mac, grabs him by the wrist, and yanks him to his feet. Frozen and feeling stupid, Mac tries to think: how do you dance to this song when you’re not sitting in the passenger’s seat of a 1993 Range Rover? But he doesn’t have to worry for long, because Dennis grabs his hand and fucking _twirls_ him like he’s a goddamn girl and Mac almost protests (he is not but remembers to Say Yes and that’s how they end up dancing all old-school, Mac with his hands on Dennis’s shoulders, Dennis with microphone in one hand and the other resting on the small of Mac’s back, swaying around like a couple at a goddamn sockhop. 

Dennis sings the rest of the chorus, and the music fades out, and reality seeps back in. They stop dancing, and Dennis looks back at the crowd by the kitchen like Where’s My Applause? And then one of the waiters shouts, “Say yes!” And—oh yeah. This whole thing is—right. Uh. 

Dennis swings his head back to Mac, hands on hips, eyebrows raised in expectation. He’s panting a bit from all the dancing around. 

“Oh, well, he hasn’t actually asked me anything yet,” Mac explains to the crowd.

“Oh. Uh. Wanna get married?” Dennis asks, as though he’s asking Mac if he wants to order Chinese food. 

“Yeah, sure,” Mac says, as though he’s telling Dennis that Chinese sounds good. 

The whole restaurant breaks out in cheers as Dennis hands Mac the ring. It’s a little bit too big. (It had better not be Frank’s cock ring. After all, it was in Mac’s _mouth_.) Mac pulls his “fiancé” into an “amorous” “embrace,” because that’s what you do, right, when someone proposes to you and you say yes? /p> 

While they’re hugging, Dennis whispers in Mac’s ear, “Hey, you don’t think we have to kiss, do you?” 

“Why would we?” 

“Isn’t that what people do when they get engaged?” 

“Yeah, but I don’t want to kiss you, dude.” 

“I don’t either, but I think they’re expecting it.” 

“Hey, Dennis.” 

“What?” 

“You’re really sweaty.” 

“Oh my god, eat shit and die. What are we gonna do?” 

“Relax, bro. I got this.” 

“Wait, what are you gonna do?” 

“You’ll see. All you have to do is sell it, okay?” 

After a moment, Mac feels Dennis nod, and then Mac leans back and puts his hands on either side of Dennis’s face. He starts moving in slowly, and he can see Dennis start to freak out like Shit Shit Shit He’s Actually Going To Kiss Me (which Mac revels in because it’s so rare to see Dennis so caught off guard), and then right at the last second, Mac slips his thumbs over Dennis’s mouth and kisses his own knuckles instead of Dennis’s lips. 

After a moment, Dennis relaxes into the “kiss,” and then he fucking _sells_ it—he drops the mic on the ground with a _clunk_ to put one hand on the back of Mac’s neck and presses the other firmly into the small of Mac’s back. Dennis pulls their bodies flush together, and after what feels like an appropriate amount of time they break apart. 

* * *

“Ha!” Frank barks, pointing at the image of Mac and Dennis kissing on Dee’s laptop. “Ha! See? I told you Operation Choking Hazard was gonna work.”

“Dude, when did I say it wasn’t gonna work?” 

“You said it was a stupid plan. You said we shouldn’t do it.” 

“No, I said we didn’t _have_ to do it. Of course worked. Dennis is a slut for the stage, Mac gets turned on by stupidity. _Obviously_ it worked. All I said was that it didn’t have to be this complicated.” 

Frank grins, his lips shining with lunchmeat grease, and points an equally greasy finger at Charlie. “But it worked!”

“Well, don’t get too cocky. It’s just a kiss.” Charlie fishes another beer out of the cooler and cracks it open. Onscreen, the crowd in the restaurant has gathered around Mac and Dennis. People are taking selfies with them, talking to them, looking at the ring, cooing in general. Even though they can’t hear any sound, Dennis is clearly rolling around in the attention like a dog in dirt, and Mac is “Huh. They look…_happy_.” 

Frank snorts. “Who cares?” 

Charlie walks on his knees to get closer to the laptop. “Doesn’t that strike you as sort of weird? That they’re happy?” 

“Why would it be weird? Maybe you’re just not used to seeing them happy.” 

“I don’t think it’s that. I just—I thought they’d be a bit more, like, freaked out or something.”

“Eh?”

Charlie presses his fingers into his eyes so hard he starts seeing shapes. Frank is so damn thick. “See, this is what I meant when I said you don’t get them like I do.”

“Well, then. Care to educate me, professor?”

“Don’t sass me, Frank,” Charlie says. “Okay. How do I explain this. Oh! Remember when I first saw that dress? When Dee showed it to me? I looked at it and I was like, ‘Clearly that’s white and gold, Dee, why are you talking to me,’ and then Dee was like, ‘Well, some people see blue and black,’ and I said ‘Bullshit,’ and then I grabbed her phone to look at it again and then I _did_ see blue and black? Do you remember that?”

“Where are you going with this?”

“Do you remember what I did?”

“Yeah, you threw Dee’s phone on the ground and stomped it up good.”

“Exactly, man! I freaked out. When you look at something you’ve seen before and suddenly it looks totally different, it freaks you out!” Charlie flings his arms out, beer sloshing out of the can in his hand. “So, like, if you realized out of nowhere that you wanna have sex with one of your best friends of twenty-five years, you’d be at least kind _of_ shaken up. _Thusly_, the only logical conclusion is: they didn’t really kiss.”

“But we _saw_ them,” Frank gestures at the laptop with both hands. “Visual evidence.”

Charlie drums his fingers on his chin, deep in contemplation. “Do me a favor and rewind that footage, Frank. To right before the kiss.” 

Frank does.

“Now go frame by frame.”

They watch and Mac and Dennis get closer and closer together in ultra-slow motion. 

“Stop!” Charlie shouts. “Right there. Zoom in. Okay, now enhance.”

Frank gives Charlie a look.

“What? They do it on _Law & Order_.”

“Yeah, I’m guessin’ that the NYPD buys their surveillance equipment from a slightly better establishment than a pawn shop owned by a hitman and his whore wife in Little Saigon.” 

“Alright, enhance, don’t enhance, whatever. I can still tell that that is not lip-to-lip contact.” Charlie taps the screen. 

“Eh?” Frank leans closer to the laptop. “Oh, shit! That asshole’s just kissin’ thumbs!”

“Precisely!” 

“Shit, good eye, Charlie. How’d you spot that?”

“Elementary, my dear Franklin.”

Frank frowns. 

“Nah, I’m just messin’ with you. It’s just something Mac used to do with this girlfriend he had in high school,” Charlie explains. “Neither of them ever wanted to actually kiss, so they just did that in school, you know, to keep up appearances or whatever. She’s a lesbian now.” 

“I think she was probably a lesbian then, Charlie.” Frank takes his glasses off and rubs his eyes. “Well, goddamnit, why didn’t you say somethin’ before we set all that up?” 

“I don’t know!” Charlie jumps to his own defense. “I just assumed Mac and Dennis would want to make out with each other!”

Frank sighs heavily and fishes his phone out of his pocket. “Well, time for Operation Kiss of the Woman Spider, then. Guess I’ll call the elevator guy.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! Leave a comment if you liked it :) I love hearing what ppl find funny bc making ppl laugh is the sole reason for my existence.


	5. "Operation Kiss of the Woman Spider"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mac and Dennis get trapped in an elevator; their plan to escape has ~unintended consequences~ (ooooOOOOooh)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi everyone! quick funny note abt this chapter: the playlist featured here was really suggested to me several months by google when i did a search (entirely unrelated to the writing of this fic) for the 1812 overture. i took a picture of the screen. you can see it [here](https://i.imgur.com/M1kc9Gn_d.jpg?maxwidth=640&shape=thumb&fidelity=medium). now, none of this is relevant to understanding this chapter, but it's important to me that you know it.
> 
> enjoy!

_Previously, on Lost..._

Mac and Dennis get to the hotel, but their hotel room only has one twin bed! Oh NO! But whatever. Mac and Dennis agree to cooperate as much as possible and go to meet with the potential investor, who thinks they're a couple. Dennis ends up "proposing" to Mac, and they fake-kiss. Meanwhile Frank and Charlie argue about whether or not Mac and Dennis are in LOVE love; once they figure out the kiss was fake, they put in motion the next scheme.

_And that's what you missed on Glee!_

* * *

Mac and Dennis burst through the doors of Serrano’s, laughing lightheartedly and (to keep up appearances) holding hands. As soon as they turn down the little hallway leading to the elevators, they practically explode from the rush of a scheme executed to perfection. 

“Holy shit, dude, that was amazing!”

“Bro, _you _were amazing, with that song?” 

“But the thumbs trick?! I mean, I haven’t thought about that move since you dated Emily Roedicker back in high school. That was genius.”

“That was nothing compared to making me an ex-cop who was shot in the line of duty,” Mac says as he hits the UP button. 

“Goddamn, we really were on fire back there,” Dennis realizes. “I gotta tell ya, man, I haven’t felt that pumped up during a scheme in _years_.”

“Me neither!” Mac laughs. “Man, I can’t believe everyone actually believed us.” 

“I can,” Dennis asserts, nodding confidently. “See, the key to pulling off a successful lie is keeping it as close to the truth as possible.” 

Mac knits his brow. “But we’re not dating.”

“Well, no. And you weren’t a police officer.” 

“And I didn’t have a crush on you in high school.” 

Dennis stares intently at the elevator doors. The truth was, he’d been hoping Mac wouldn’t bring that up. It had caught Dennis unawares in the moment, and he panicked, very briefly spiralling, for the second time in as many days, into the pits of questioning everything he thought he knew. Was Dee right? _Was _Mac into him? Did Mac really have a crush on him in high school? Was that supposed to be some kind of ill-timed confession? And if it was, how could Dennis respond in a way that kept up appearances for Michael while also letting Mac know that—well, Dennis had still been deciding what exactly he wanted Mac to know when Dennis realized that he was spiralling about something that wasn’t even true in the first place. 

“No, you didn’t.” Dennis stares intently at the elevator doors and clears his throat. “But, you know. Other than that.”

“Right,” Mac says. 

The adrenaline has started to dissipate, like soda going flat—it still _tastes_ carbonated, somehow, all metallic and strange, but the actual bubbles are few and far between. Mac and Dennis both look down between them at the same time.

They hurry to untangle their fingers. 

Dennis uses his now-free hand to scratch behind his ear while Mac wipes his palm on his shirt. Holding out that same hand in front of him, Mac contemplates the ring still on his finger. “You think this is Frank’s cock ring?” He slips it off to inspect it more closely. 

“Oh, _gross_, dude.” 

“You’re tellin’ me! This thing was in my _mouth_. Here, look at it, what do you think?” He holds the ring closer to Dennis’s face.

“God, get that away from me.” Dennis bats Mac’s hand away. 

“So you _do_ think it’s Frank’s cock ring.”

“No, I don’t know if it is or not, and frankly I don’t _want_ to know, but if it is, I don’t want it near my face.” 

Mac turns the ring over and over in his hand. “I think I’d rather know for sure. I mean, I guess the alcohol in the champagne would’ve killed any of Frank’s dick germs. But not any of Frank’s dick _spirit_.” 

From a safe distance, Dennis hesitantly examines the ring. It is too large for Mac’s ring finger, but it’s not _huge_. “I hate that I’m saying this, but I think Frank’s dick has gotta be bigger than that.” 

“Ewwwww!” Mac jeers with gleeful disgust. “Dude, that’s your dad!” 

“You asked!”

“Noooo, I just asked you if you thought it was his cock ring. I didn’t ask you tell me how big your dad’s dick was,” Mac snickers.

“He’s not even my dad!”

“Eh, tomato potato.” Mac smirks like he’s _so_ sure that he’s right about the whole thing that he’s not even gonna waste his time arguing anymore. The elevator doors finally slide open and Mac steps in front of Dennis.

“After you, _sweetheart_,” Dennis mutters. He leans against the wall of the elevator while Mac presses the button for the fourth floor. The doors slide shut and the elevator lurches into motion with a somewhat worrying jolt before the speed evens out.

“Whoa, dude, look at this certificate thing,” says Mac, pointing to an official-looking piece of paper posted above the panel of buttons. “The last time this elevator was inspected was in _2003_.”

“So what?”

“‘So what’? Dennis, that’s like, what, twelve—”

Mac is cut off by the sickening screech of metal on metal; Dennis is thrown forward and lands hard on his hands and knees. By the time he figures out what’s happening, the elevator has already stopped moving. 

Dennis waits for a second until his heart rate has gone down from hummingbird speed and glances up at Mac, who has his back pressed up against the panel of buttons, arms braced on the walls beside him for balance. 

Dennis says, “If you so much as _mention _that goddamn inspection certificate, so help me god—”

“_Shh_!” Mac shoves Dennis’s shoulder hard with his foot.

Dennis topples over and lands hard on his side. “The _fuck_, Mac!” He hates being shushed, but he hates it even more when Mac lashes out like that—not because Dennis is personally hurt by it or anything, but because he knows that Mac is going to get all apologetic afterwards like he does every time, which is always a whole big thing that Dennis would rather not deal with. He’d much rather forget than forgive. 

Dennis hauls himself up to standing to find that, instead of looking sorry, Mac is focused on typing something on his phone.

Dennis starts to ask, “What are you—” 

Mac holds up one finger, finishes typing, and shows the screen to Dennis: _GoPro on sealing_

Dennis looks up at the ceiling and Mac smacks Dennis upside the head lightly, but hard enough to be extremely offensive. Mac is treading dangerous waters here. He should know that. 

Mac types something else and shows it to Dennis. _It’s Frank and Charlie!!!!!!!!!!!! _

“Yeah, dude. Obviously. But why the typing? They can’t hear—”

“Shhhh!” Mac shushes him sharply, and now Dennis _is_ starting to take personal offense, because not only does Dennis hate being shushed, but Mac _knows_ Dennis hates being shushed and keeps doing it anyway. Apparently wholly unaware of Dennis’s mounting rage, however, Mac finishes typing something else: _Its MY GoPro. Not security cams going 2 D’s lap top_

“Since when do you have a GoPro?” Dennis asks, genuinely confused. 

“Like—I don’t know, a while,” Mac whispers, frustrated. “For Project Badass. You knew that. You were the one that bought it for me!”

Dennis frowns. “I did?”

“Well, your credit card did, but I asked you first and you said—”

“Whatever! It doesn’t matter.” Dennis rakes a hand through his hair. His scalp is already getting sweaty. “That doesn’t answer the question of why you’re typing and not talking, because their laptop still doesn’t have—” 

Mac slaps his hand over Dennis’s mouth, tapping out more text with the other hand. 

With some effort, Dennis pries Mac’s hand off his mouth and throws it away from him like it’s some sort of vermin. “Seriously, Mac, you are _asking _for it,” he warns before he leans over to read the new message, typed one-handed: _Gorpos connerct 2 Alps in fones!!!!!!!!!!!!!_

“‘‘Alps’?”

“Oh my god, _apps_, Dennis! Use context clues!” Mac hisses while typing furiously: _They might be able 2 hear us!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!_

“Were that many exclamation points really necessary?”

Mac takes his sweet time typing: _YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! All comms must be textual until I lower threat level from yellow 2 orange_

God, Mac is stupid. He’s _so _stupid. “Is yellow higher than orange?”

“Yes.”

“_Why_?!” 

“Because that’s—that’s just the way it is! Yellow is way more of a threatening color!”

“No, it’s not! Where the hell are you getting your information?”

“I’m not taking—!” Mac starts to shout, but after a quick look up at the GoPro, he lowers his voice to a hoarse whisper: “I’m not taking questions so just use your stupid phone and type, okay?”

“No, I’m not doing that.” Dennis shuts down that train of thought. Although the whole thing does give him an idea. He pulls out his phone from his pocket. “I have a better solution.”

“What?”

“I’m just gonna call the front desk and tell them we’re stuck.” He types in a search for _Hotel Huis Clos _to get the number. 

“Oh. Yeah. That’s—that’s solid. Good teamwork.” 

Dennis rolls his eyes and hits “search.” The little wheel spins and spins and spins…but nothing happens. 

“Fuck. I don’t have any _goddamn _service. Goddamnit!”

“Are you connected to the wi-fi?”

Dennis stares daggers at Mac. The air is stuffy and hot already and the elevator is a lot smaller than it seemed when they first got in. “No, Mac, I’m _not_ connected to the wi-fi, I didn’t think of _that_. _How _could I be so stupid? Whatever would I do without _you_ and your big smart _brain _here to save us?” 

“Don’t be like that, man,” Mac groans. “It’s just, like, if you’re connected to the wi-fi, then why don’t you have any service?”

“I don’t know!” Dennis explodes. “I don’t fucking know how wi-fi works! Sometimes it just doesn’t connect! It’s not my fault it doesn’t connect! Some networks just don’t know how!” 

“Oh my god, chill out, man,” Mac gripes, only mildly annoyed. He looks back at his own phone. “I’ll just give it a try on mine.”

“What, you don’t believe me?” 

“I _believe _you, I just want to—”

But Dennis doesn’t hear the rest of what Mac says, because, oh thank god, he’s found a lifeline: the CALL button, the one that’s in every elevator everywhere. Of course! This sort of thing happens all the time. Elevators get stuck sometimes. There are contingency plans in place for emergencies just like this. It’s all very simple. He presses the button. 

Nothing happens. 

Dennis waits five seconds before pressing it again. And again. And again and again and then he punches it and screams “Mother_fucker_!” and stumbles backwards, his hand surely broken now.

“Good job, dude,” Mac says dryly. 

With simmering rage about to boil over into sheer panic, Dennis kicks the elevator door, then bangs on it several times with the hand that is not-surely-broken. “HELP! HELP! WE’RE STUCK IN HERE!” 

“Jesus Christ, calm down!” Mac grabs him hard by both shoulders and pulls him away from the door. “Since when are you claustrophobic?”

“I’m _not_!” 

“It’s okay if you are. I mean, I’m afraid of heights, so—” 

“Roundhouse the door,” Dennis orders.

“What?”

“Roundhouse the door, dude!”

Mac laughs, then realizes that Dennis is being serious. “No. No, I can’t—it’s not—this isn’t the right scenario for—I mean, if we were—”

“Jesus fuck! Of course the _one _time I actually ask you to do a roundhouse, you won’t do it.” Full of venom, Dennis sinks his metaphorical teeth in right where he knows it’ll hurt Mac the most: “Why do I bother? You can’t even do a roundhouse.”

“I can _absolutely_ do a roundhouse!” Mac barks. “But the only thing on the other side of the door is gonna be the elevator shaft, which would render a roundhouse useless!” 

“_How_?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, can _you_ dig through concrete with your bare hands?!” 

“Well, no, but—” Dennis rubs his neck. Looks at the floor. Fuck. Better to change the subject. “So that’s it, then? We’re just stuck in here?”

“Uh. I guess?”

“Where are all your stupid ideas? You always have stupid ideas. You should be having stupid ideas like crazy right now!”

“My ideas are _not _stupid!” Mac takes a big step towards Dennis, pointing at him threateningly, and speaks quietly. “I tried to establish a communication protocol that reduces the risk of us being caught, which we _need_, but you wouldn’t let me.”

The laugh that comes out of Dennis’s throat is high and hysterical and vicious. “A _communication protocol_? Do you realize how idiotic you sound? This isn’t _Die Hard_, Mac! We’re not dealing with Hans fucking Gruber, okay? We’re dealing with Fr—”

Mac lunges forward in one fluid motion, slapping his palm over Dennis’s mouth again. The impact makes Dennis stumble backwards and hit the wall behind him. Before Dennis can shove back, Mac uses his forearm to pin him against the wall, which forces Dennis to acknowledge a truth he so often tries to ignore: Mac really _is_ stronger than him. All the air is knocked clean out of Dennis’s lungs; all the fight leaves his body in one dizzying rush.

“Seriously, bro, I know you hate listening to me, but you could at least have the decency to whisper.” Mac’s voice is low and urgent; his body is way too close. 

Wide-eyed, Dennis nods once. Mac frees him. 

Dennis doubles over, hands on his knees, fucking humiliating, and takes a long time to catch his breath. 

Eventually, he comes back to himself. He’s not embarrassed anymore. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about. 

His phone is lying on the elevator floor, he notices; he doesn’t remember dropping it, but he must have. It’s got one of those wallet cases, it’s new, Dennis got it a few weeks ago, and a couple of cards and things have fallen out. He picks everything up with shaky hands, puts the cards back in the pockets, grateful to have something to focus on. “I have an idea,” he says at last, then clears his throat because it doesn’t come out as steady as he feels. “What if I—I’m just gonna play some music really loud and then we can, you know. Communicate.” 

“Okay. Yeah, that’s a good plan.” 

The music starts playing. They both slide down the walls of the elevator to sit on the floor opposite each other. The song is calming, something to hold on to, something to keep the ground solid beneath him, and Dennis shuts his eyes. He knows that Mac is worried about him. Mac feels bad, and Mac is going to try to talk about what just happened, when what just happened might as well be years ago, as far as Dennis is concerned. He wishes he were literally anywhere else. But he might as well get it over with. 

So when he opens his eyes, he’s surprised to see that, instead of looking worried, Mac is making a face at Dennis’s phone like he just ate something bitter. 

“What?” Dennis asks.

Mac’s sour expression startles and disappears, quickly hidden away like contraband from the cops. He looks at Dennis carefully now, testing the water. “Uh. You doin’ okay, bud?” 

“Uh, yeah, _bud_.” Weird question. Dennis is doing fine. Isn’t that obvious? “Why wouldn’t I be?” 

“Oh. Uh—no reason.” 

“Why were you just making that face?”

“Oh, it’s just…I mean.” He points at Dennis’s phone, skeptical. “Classical?”

“Yeah,” Dennis answers, but Mac keeps looking at him, like he’s waiting for Dennis to say more. So he does: “Well, there’s no service so I can’t stream anything, and this playlist is all I have actually downloaded on my phone.”

“Okay, but why?”

“What do you mean, why? It’s my sex playlist.”

“Okay, but _why_?”

“I mean, I wouldn’t want to be about to bang a chick somewhere with no service and get caught without a soundtrack to set the mood. So I downloaded the playlist.” 

“No, I mean, why is _this _song on your sex playlist?”

“Oh. Because chicks dig classical music.”

“Right, and like, I get that.” Mac seems to be trying very hard to maintain composure, like when he’s trying to understand something about Charlie’s lifestyle without hurting his feelings. “But…this is the fireworks song.”

“You mean the 1812 Overture?” Dennis arches an eyebrow. “Yes, it is.”

They both listen to it for a moment.

Mac crosses his arms in thought. “Chicks find this sexy?”

“Of course they do. Why wouldn’t they? It’s a sexy song. I mean, the bravery? The _panache_? The _live cannons_? Everything about this song is sexy.”

Mac bobs his head back and forth noncommittally, clearly not buying it. 

“I mean, it’s supposed to play at the end of—this playlist has a very curated vibe, but I just hit shuffle—”

“I’m sure your sex playlist’s vibe is very curated, Dennis,” Mac says, palms out in surrender.

“You know what? I’ll show you.” Dennis skips to the next song. “Now, you can’t say this isn’t sexy.”

“Whatever, dude.”

Okay, that’s just offensive. “Mac, I _know_ you did not just ‘whatever’ the Boyz II the Men.” 

“It’s not _them_, it’s just—how _are _we gonna get out of here?”

Okay. Yeah, that’s valid. To be safe, Dennis turns up the volume of the music (“_I’LL MAKE LOVE TO YOU, LIKE YOU WANT ME TO_”) and says, “Well, I mean, you were right before. I think we’re just kind of stuck here until Frank and Charlie start up the elevator.”

“What if they don’t?”

“They will. We just have to wait them out.” 

* * *

“Man, I wish GoPros had microphones.” Charlie is bundled up in a sleeping bag, lying on his back, feet propped up on the wall of the van, head turned towards the laptop. “You sure they don’t? I mean, you’re not that great with technology, maybe—” 

“Positive,” Frank calls over his shoulder through the opened back doors of the van. He’s taking a piss at the edge of the hotel parking lot. “It don’t matter, though. We don’t need to know what they’re sayin’.” 

“But what if they’re professing their love for each other?”

“Jesus Christ,” Frank mutters under his breath. The sound of Frank’s zipper. Some shuffling footsteps. The van rocks as he climbs back in. “You really think Mac and Dennis are gonna, what, ride off inna the sunset together, Charlie?” He pulls the back doors shut with a bang and sits down heavily on the floor of the van. “Do you realize how stupid you sound?”

“I don’t sound stupid! Maybe they _are _gonna ride off into the sunset together, you don’t know! Sure, neither of them have ever been romantic _before_, but maybe that’s because they’ve never been in _love _before. And, like, once they’re together, they’ll be in love and romantic and happy. You know, like me and the Waitress.”

“You and the Waitress aren’t together, Charlie.” 

“And we’re not happy, are we?” Charlie grins up at Frank, shoots him some finger guns. “Gotcha there.”

“See, that’s your problem right there.” Frank pops open the cooler and pulls out a deli bag of roast beef. He’s in a very puffy white jacket and snowpants. He looks just like an egg. Charlie’s not thinking that in a mean way; looking like an egg was Frank’s intent. “Your problem is that you think bein’ in love is what makes people happy.”

“Of course it is. You can’t be happy if you’re not in love. Everyone knows that, Frank.”

Frank shoves a handful of meat into his mouth. “Well, I’m not in love with anyone, ‘n I’m happy.” 

“Oh, bullshit, dude. Bullshit! You’re just as miserable as the rest of us.” 

“No, I _used _to be miserable.” More roast beef. “And then I got rid of my whore wife and I started hangin’ out with you, and hangin’ out with the gang, an’ I stopped lyin’ to myself. Lyin’ about who I am and what I want.” More roast beef. “See, _that’s_ the key to happiness. An’ that’s why Mac and Dennis, and you, and Dee also—that’s why youse’ll never be happy. Because you won’t stop lyin’ to yourselves.” 

“Okay, but…you realize that you _do _lie to yourself, right?”

“About what?” Before Charlie can answer, Frank continues, “Think about it! I spent the first 50-odd years of my life tryin’ to be successful, workin’ in jazz clubs, chasin’ after Shadynasty, competin’ with my brother, doin’ mountains of cocaine, goin’ to Vietnam and runnin’ factories and pretendin’ that my family was normal and that I loved my whore wife when all I really wanted to do was party and pull off weird schemes and sleep around and be the trashy troll I was always meant to be! And now I do exactly that, and I’m happier than I ever been in my life.”

“Maybe you’re happier now because you _started_ lying to yourself, not because you _stopped_,” Charlie counters. “Y’ever thought of that?” 

“Charlie, you’re talkin’ to a man who openly admits to shavin’ his toenails wid’ a knife. What else could I possibly have to hide? What’s worse than that?” 

Charlie laughs. “I dunno, dude, I can think of one _gigantic_ thing you’re lying to yourself about.”

Frank scoffs. “Oh yeah? Like what? That I’m ugly? I know. That I’m fat? That I’m bald? That I’m—”

“That you might be my dad.” 

That shuts him up for a hot second.

“BOOM!” Charlie cries, triumphant. “You know, I know we’ve been having shitty luck with microphones lately, but if we had one here, I’d still drop it.” He cackles, cranes his neck to look up at Frank. “Oh, I wish you could see the look on your face, man! It’s _priceless_.” 

Frank shakes his head briskly, jowls flapping. “No, no, no, that doesn’t count. You can’t lie to yourself about something that’s not even true in the first place.”

“You don’t know if it’s true or not. You never took the test!” 

“I don’t have to. I already know the answer.”

“Nah, you’re just lying to yourself, man. I know it, the gang knows it, my mom knows it. You can deny it all you want. Doesn’t stop it from being true.” 

“Yeah? Well, you can believe I’m lyin’ all you want. Doesn’t stop you from bein’ dead wrong.” 

“Well, good thing that reality is only what we make of it,” Charlie spits back. He pauses. Replays what he said in his head. His eyes bug out. He swings his legs off the wall and sits up, shrouded in the sleeping bag. “Shit, dude, that was _deep_.”

Frank smirks. “Those edibles kickin’ in?”

Charlie stares at Frank for what feels like an hour and also feels like only two seconds. “Maybe a little,” he decides. “But my point remains: you’re lying about yourself just as much as anyone, you’re not really happy, and _did_ you pack any potato chips because that’s like a physical necessity for me right now.” 

“Uuuh...lemme see…” Frank digs around in one of the shopping bags full of stakeout snacks. “Uh…I got some pork snagglins…” 

“That’ll do, pig,” Charlie accepts, beckoning for the bag. He rips the package open and shovels a handful in his mouth. Through a mouth full of pork rinds, he asks, “So when do we start up the elevator again?”

“When they start goin’ to town on each other.”

“What if they don’t?”

“They will. We just gotta wait ’em out.” 

* * *

Dennis’s sex playlist _sucks_.

It’s not like Mac didn’t know that Dennis played cheesy music while he banged chicks. He was well aware. It’s just that they’ve gone through the whole playlist about three and a half times now, which really makes it sink in how thoroughly these songs _suck_. (Except “I’ll Make Love to You” because Boyz II Men are from Philly so, like, respect.) 

They’ve been sitting in silence for a while now, and Mac has kept his cool the entire time, despite the the fact that the air is stuffy and hot, and the fact that they’ve been in there for two and a half hours, and the fact that Mac has never been so bored in his entire life, and the fact that Dennis keeps doing this unconscious thing he does when he’s in a bad mood where he takes a breath and then holds it for far too long and then lets it out in a rush and it fucking drives Mac crazy (but he knows from experience that telling Dennis is worthless because he A: gets mad and B: doesn’t realize he’s doing it when it happens so he can’t really prevent it)—despite all of that, Mac has kept his cool because _someone _has to stay calm here, but “My Heart Will Go On” starting up for the fourth time is what finally sets him off. 

“_Goddamnit_, holy shit, can we skip this one?” 

“Hmm?” Dennis is still sitting across from Mac, his head leaning back against the wall, his eyes closed.

“I said, skip this one. I’m sick of it.”

“You’re sick of it? After only two plays?”

“Four, Dennis. This is the _fourth _time it’s played.” 

“Even so.” Dennis frowns, still not bothering to open his eyes. “Makes me wonder how you survived 1998.”

“I _did_ survive 1998, which is the reason why I can’t stand this song now. It’s like you and white russians.”

Dennis’s face twists into a half-hearted nauseated scowl. “Don’t talk about white russians.” 

“See? That’s how I feel about this stupid song.”

Dennis lifts a tired arm and waves him off lazily like I Can’t Deal With This Right Now.

“Why do you even have this song on here?” Mac asks. The question has been on his mind for a while. “All these songs are like, super feelings-y.”

“It’s for the second bang of the system,” Dennis explains wearily. He still hasn’t opened his eyes. “Inspire Hope. The one where I tell her I love her, which makes the sex all passionate and shit, hence the Celine Dion and the Whitney Houston and the Aerosmith.”

“Then explain the Tom Jones.” 

That makes Dennis open one judgmental eye and stare at Mac with it. Then he shuts it again. “I don’t have to explain myself to you.”

Mac doesn’t say anything.

Finally, Dennis opens both his eyes. (Mac knows Dennis can’t help explaining himself.) “‘Sex Bomb’ is a very sexy song, Mac,” Dennis states. “You just don’t understand sex.”

“One of us doesn’t, that’s for sure.”

“Well, what do _you _listen to when you’re banging someone, then?”

At that, Mac shifts on the floor, which has become suddenly uncomfortable. The truth is, Mac hasn’t banged anyone in…well, in a long time. Long enough for him to know that his old routine (including music) would probably have changed by now. Sometimes Mac sleeps in the bar for a night to make the gang _think_ he’s getting laid, because it would be weird if he wasn’t, what with him being the party boy of the gang. They just expect it of him at this point. But truth be told, his game has been off since…Mac tries to backtrack to the last time he had sex with another person. The first answer he arrives at doesn’t count because masturbating next to your best friend out of necessity isn’t sex at _all_. The second answer he arrives at doesn’t count either because that was just wrestling that got out of hand. Damn, that was like, what, two years ago now? Is Mac pathetic? Would it be considered sad to not even remember when the last time you had sex with someone was because it was so long ago? He’s starting to think further back when Dennis interrupts. “Dude, it’s not that difficult of a question.”

“Huh?”

“What’s on your sex playlist?”

“Oh, I don’t have one.”

Dennis looks at him like he just grew two heads. “So what do you listen to?”

“Nothing. The radio. Whatever. I don’t know,” Mac answers. Now _he’s_ the one feeling claustrophobic. “I think we might die in here, dude.”

“Oh, please. Don’t be so dramatic.”

“What if we run out of oxygen?”

“That takes a long time.”

“How long?”

“Long.” 

“Yeah, but _how_ long?”

Dennis shrugs one shoulder. “I don’t know. Days, maybe.”

“_Maybe_?”

“Sorry for not knowing the exact chemistry of oxygen off the top of my head.” 

“Sorry for being worried about _dying_.”

“We’re not gonna die.” 

A thought occurs to Mac. “Turn up the music.”

Dennis quirks an eyebrow at him, but turns up the volume. Mac scootches across the floor to sit next to Dennis, then asks, “Are we sure that this is part of Frank and Charlie’s scheme?”

“Who else would put a GoPro on the ceiling?”

“It could be the hotel’s security camera.”

“It’s attached with duct tape, Mac.”

“Ah. Right,” Mac says, chewing on his lip as he thinks. “Okay, check this out. If Frank and Charlie stopped the elevator, then they probably have the power to start it up again, right?”

“I sure goddamn hope so.” 

“So they’re probably waiting for us to do something before letting us free.”

“Yeah, man, they’re waiting for us to bang.”

“So—wait.” Mac turns to face Dennis and leans away from him in surprise. “You knew that already?”

“From the second I saw that GoPro.” Dennis squints at Mac. “You didn’t _just _put that together, did you?” 

“Uh, no, dude, I totally figured it out, like, hours ago,” Mac scoffs. He hopes he’s convincing. “I just thought maybe _you _didn’t get it.”

“Well, I do, but it’s not like knowing that makes a difference. Because we’re not going to bang.” 

“I know,” Mac hurries to assure Dennis. “But, so…how are we gonna get out of here, then?”

Dennis sits forward, away from the wall, and wraps his arms around his knees. “What I don’t get is why they stopped the elevator at all. I mean, they think we kissed back at the restaurant, right? So why would they keep us from going back to our room and banging it out? Something must be stopping them.”

“Hmm,” Mac chews his lip some more. Another thought had occurred to him a while back, and he thought it was stupid, but maybe he should just put it on the table and then Dennis can agree that it’s stupid and they can move on. “What if they knew the kiss was fake?”

“How could they possibly know that?”

“I mean, Charlie knew about the thumb trick, too. Back in the day.” 

“Huh.” Dennis mulls that over. “So if they knew the kiss was fake, then they’d _know_ we weren’t going back to our room to bang.”

Well, at least Dennis doesn’t think Mac is stupid. 

“So…I guess that means…we just have to do it again. But if they catch us faking this time—well, there’s no reason for us to be faking now, because there’s no one else around to be faking _for_,” Dennis says, doing the calculations in his head as he talks. “So if they catch us faking, they might figure out that we know about the whole thing and then Dee loses the bet and…oh. Shit.” 

Mac’s been trying to follow the plot, but he can’t, and “oh shit” does not sound like a good conclusion. “‘Oh shit’ what? What’s ‘oh shit’?” 

Dennis spins himself around so he’s sitting on his heels, facing Mac. “Don’t freak out, but I think—I think we have to _actually_ kiss.”

Mac freaks out. He pushes away from Dennis as far as he can, babbling his refusal. “No, no, no, no. Uh-uh. Nope. Hard pass. That’s too gay.”

“It’s not gay, it’s just acting,” Dennis says, his hands out like he’s trying to calm a feral dog. “Heath Ledger wasn’t gay, was he? Jake Gyllenhaal isn’t gay! I mean, Jesus, they give straight actors _awards_ for pretending to be gay. Are _they_ going to hell?”

“Dennis, _everyone_ in Hollywood is going to Hell.” 

“Okay, but not for being gay, though, right?”

“Well, no,” Mac concedes after a pause. “Not the straight ones. They go for other reasons. Like being Protestants.”

“...right. And I’m straight, and you’re, y’know,” Dennis makes a vague gesture with his hand at Mac’s whole person, “straight, so we won’t go to hell. Not for this, anyway, because this is just acting and we’re not in Hollywood.”

Mac is breathing, fast and heavy, and his jaw is clenched so hard he feels his molars squeaking together. He doesn’t look at Dennis or say anything to him. Everything he just said does make sense. But _still_. 

“Come on, dude.” Dennis is practically begging now. “This is for _survival_. It’s not gay if you’re doing it to avoid dying!”

“_I thought you said we weren’t gonna die!_” Mac explodes, his voice high and terrified. 

“Mac, listen to me.” Dennis says, tilting his chin down and looking up at Mac the way he does when he’s trying to calm Mac down, like I’m Not A Threat Look How Small I Am. “We just gotta do it for like five seconds. Ten seconds _max_. Just enough to be believable.”

“And _then_ what?”

“I don’t—” 

“What’ll they think when we get off the elevator and we _don’t _bang?” 

“I don’t—”

“What if it doesn’t even _work_?!”

“I don’t know! I don’t care! We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. I just want to get out of here, and this might work. Come on, Mac, don’t be a—” 

“Oh my God, fine!” Mac shouts, then lowers his voice again, mindful of the microphone. “I’ll kiss you, dude, Jesus Christ. Just—gimme a second, okay?”

Dennis, whose face frozen was in the middle of the sentence he was saying before Mac interrupted, shuts his mouth and nods. “Yeah, of course, buddy.” His voice comes out strangely hoarse. 

Mac shuts his eyes and inhales slowly (tries to, anyway) through his nose. This is—it’s gonna be fine. He feels like he’s gonna pass out, but it’s gonna be _fine_. Just ten seconds max. He can handle anything for ten seconds. Maybe…maybe it won’t be so bad if he can, like, trick himself into believing that Dennis is a chick. It wouldn’t be that hard. He’s wearing mascara, after all. But instead of helping, the thought makes Mac even more uncomfortable, probably because he knows deep down that Dennis isn’t—

Mac lets out a yelp that is muffled by Dennis’s lips on his.

What the _fuck. _

His eyes snap open as alarms go off in his head—scary alarms, life-or-death alarms, alarms used for containment breaches and incoming missiles and tornados and going against established protocol, which Dennis has done. Mac had made it explicitlyclear that _he _would be the one to initiate this (he’d said “_I _will kiss _you_”!) so of _course _he wasn’t ready for it, he was caught completely off guard and now he can’t even remember the _basic _mechanics of kissing so Dennis must feel like he’s kissing a dead fish and Mac is suddenly _very_ aware of his own body, of his hands lying stupid on the ground at his sides, of his forehead beading with sweat, and Dennis’s mouth tastes like mouth and Dennis is exuding heat like he’s on fire and Dennis’s eyes are shut and _fuck_ Mac shouldn’t knowthat Dennis’s eyes are closed because that means _Mac’s _eyes are _open _and everyone knows you’re not supposed to keep your eyes open when you’re kissing someone, so this whole thing isn’t even convincing which means Frank and Charlie are going to see right through them and Dennis will have kissed Mac for nothing which is just fucking embarrassing for the both of them. 

In real time, though, they’ve only been kissing (or, to be more accurate, mashing their mouths together) for half a second, and then Mac has a revelation: he doesn’t have to worry about his eyes being open. He can just close them. 

So he does. 

For about two more sweaty seconds, they stay frozen in this awkward high-school-party spin-the-bottle kiss, the kind of kiss that is obviously not going to result in sex, and sure enough, nothing happens, the elevator stays put, and Mac knows in his heart that for them to have a chance in Hell of getting out of here, one of them is going to have to turn this into something resembling a real kiss, and by God Mac is _not _going to let Dennis catch him off guard again. 

So Mac lets his mouth fall open just a little bit, just enough to fit his lips together with Dennis’s, and then the instinct of kissing comes back to him all at once and he surges forward, pressing harder against Dennis’s lips, which makes Dennis breathe in through his nose, sharp and quick. 

In the second after Dennis gasps (that’s really the only word for it), Mac prepares for him to pull back, fully expecting Dennis to chicken out, fully ready to laugh in his stupid prettyboy face and call him a pussy for not being able to stay in character and blame the loss of the bet on Dennis for the rest of their lives.

Dennis, however, does not chicken out.

Instead, Dennis does the exact opposite. Instead, Dennis roosters in (?) and his lips come alive against Mac’s and then his hand is there on the back of Mac’s neck, firm and solid and hot. Dennis pushes himself up off his heels, up on to his knees, and now he’s kneeling over Mac, and with the new leverage, Dennis can kiss harder, faster. Almost urgent. 

Okay, so that is _clearly_ a power play on Dennis’s part, which simply will not stand, so Mac wakes up one of his stupid hands, reaches up, weaves his fingers through Dennis’s hair, and tugs—not too hard, not too soft, just enough to show him who’s really in charge. 

And then Dennis fucking _moans_. 

They both go rigid.

Yes, it was quiet. Yes, it was short. Yes, Dennis cut it off. But it happened. That really just happened. Dennis really just _moaned_ while making out with Mac. That is a sentence he never thought he’d be able to say. 

Mac is _so _gonna give Dennis shit for that later.

But that’s later. Right now, they’re frozen in place, and he just _knows_ that Dennis thinks Mac is going to be the one to get freaked out and pull away first. Mac has decided that is _not _going to be how this goes. He’s determined to be the one to push _Dennis _too far, to make Dennis be the one to end it. He’s going to establish dominance once and for all. So Mac takes things further and runs his tongue along Dennis’s bottom lip.

Instead of pulling away, Dennis only parts his lips more and meets Mac’s tongue with his own, which in hindsight was a consequence Mac should have recognized as a possibility but oh Goddammit Dennis is _really_ fucking good at this. Mac had always thought that Dennis was lying or exaggerating whenever he bragged about his makeout skills, but _this_? This is kind of blowing Mac’s mind to the point where he’s hypnotized, plain and simple, ready to follow wherever Dennis’s lips might take him. 

He’s so entranced by it that he almost misses Dennis moan _again_, deeper and more pointed, more _wanting_, and with a few hurried, clumsy movements, Dennis swings his left leg up over Mac’s thighs to straddle him, his lips stumbling on Mac’s as he tries to keep kissing him. Mac keeps his one hand threaded through Dennis’s hair while the other one finds its way around to the small of Dennis’s back, grasping at the fabric of his shirt there. Both of Dennis’s hands are on Mac’s face now, long fingers reaching to weave through the hair at the nape of Mac’s neck, thumbs pressing into Mac’s cheeks, coaxing his mouth open further, and Mac feels something, low in his gut, it’s like…it’s like this lurch that starts right at the top of your stomach and right under the center of your chest, and then it plunges down into the base of your pelvis and then shoots up to your heart and spreads up the back of your neck and down the base of your spine, all the way to your toes. It’s a good feeling, it’s a great feeling, and it’s a vageuly familiar feeling, but it’s a been long time since he’s felt it, and it’s been even longer since someone has touched him like this, and Dennis nips at Mac’s lower lip with his teeth and Mac gasps out loud against Dennis’s mouth: “_Fuck_.” 

Oh. Uh oh. 

It’s turned on. That’s what the feeling is.

And so Mac panics. 

Mac panics, because here’s the problem: Mac has heard from a shit-ton of other people that their minds go completely blank when they’re turned on, or, like, they get laserlike focus when they’re having sex or jacking off or whatever. Unfortunately, Mac is exactly the opposite. When his motor gets going, his mind is—well, it gets messy, and it’s definitely _not_ blank. All those terrible thoughts, the ones that think themselves, start exploding rapidfire in his head like goddamn popcorn and he starts to think about things that he really _shouldn’t_ be thinking about while having sex or jacking off or whatever, and then the more he tries to _stop _the thoughts from thinking themselves, the more Mac has to think about them, which makes the thoughts rub their grubby little devil hands together and go _Ooh, what ELSE shouldn’t we think about? _and then they think themselves even _more_, it’s a goddamn chain reaction set off by (Mac hypothesizes) all the blood going from his brain to his dick, and—well, he still gets off, it still _feels _good, and just like all those other thoughts that think themselves, they’re not _actions_ so no one has to _know_ about them but _fuck_ Mac wishes his mind was like everyone else’s and just went blank and stupid when he got turned on.

But it’s not, which means that in this particular situation—the one where he’s trapped in an elevator with goddamn _Dennis_, who is currently _straddling him and making out with him_—in this scenario, of course those thoughts are all about banging Dennis, who Mac doesn’t even want to bang, but of course now the thought has been thunk and now Mac is _really_ thinking about it, in detail and practically of his own accord. He feels kind of like he’s going to pass out and kind of like he wants to thrust his hips up against Dennis, and (oh, _great_) now Mac has an honest-to-God, bonafide boner, which he prays that Dennis won’t notice because a boner is _clearly_ over the line, power moves be damned. Mac thinks about pushing him off, but God help him, he doesn’t want to, so he just tries his hardest to keep his lower body as still as possible, to force everything down there behave—but it’s for nothing, because in a twist of events that no one could have seen coming, _Dennis_ is the one to give in, to roll his hips hard against _Mac_, and (_fuck_) Mac feels something hard and hot and unmistakable in Dennis’s pants pressing against a similar hard, hot, unmistakable something in his own and that’s when Mac finally finally _finally_ comes to his senses and shoves Dennis off his lap. 

Dennis tumbles to the side. 

The only sounds in the elevator are the two of them panting heavily like they both just sprinted a long distance, and the goddamn fireworks song playing over Dennis’s tinny phone speakers.

Mac doesn’t look at Dennis. Looks anywhere but.

And then the elevator shudders back to life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks 4 reading!


	6. "The Fish That God Forgot"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mac prays. Dennis copes. Dee schemes. The Waitress gets dragged in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i got my hundredth kudos last night! thank you guys so much for reading this and responding to it so kindly. <3 
> 
> in thanks, here's an awfully long chapter with a lot of nothing terribly sexy. lmao i'm sorry about that. mac and dennis will be back together next chapter, but they need to spend a teeny bit of time a part right now. but i still think this chapter is good shit, if you like character psychology (which i do). also, this is where the deetress starts! LET'S GO LESBIANS* 
> 
> this chapter isn't TERRIBLY dark but it does need some **trigger warnings** for: **mental illness, truly terrible coping mechanisms, addiction/alcoholism, and dennis talking to a woman.**
> 
> despite the trigger warnings, though, this chapter contains one of my favorite jokes in the whole fic, so! enjoy! and please leave a comment/tell your friends if you like this fic. :) 
> 
> *idk if they're lesbians or not in this fic tho, it could go either way, i'm just using the meme lmao

_Previously, on Lost…_

Dennis and Mac leave the investment/proposal dinner high on a successful scheme, but Frank and Charlie, who figured out that their post-proposal kiss was fake, trap them in the hotel’s elevator, forcing them to actually make out. They get a little too into it, but they do escape the elevator.

_…and that’s what you missed on Glee!_

* * *

The door to Room 417 is shut and locked. Mac knows this for certain because he’s tried the knob many times, unsuccessfully. The only thing to do is wait. Which sucks. Mac hates waiting maybe more than anything in the whole world. But his so-called “best friend” is actually a fucking asshole, so Mac is left to sit next to the door with his back against the wall, waiting, and feeling, just, like…weird. 

So he does what he always does when he feels weird: he folds his hands under his chin, closes his eyes, and prays. 

_Hey, uh…God? It’s Ronald McDonald. The guy from South Philadelphia, not the clown. You got a second?_

** _Sure. What’s up, Mac?_ **

_God! Hi! Oh, I’m so glad you’re here ’cause I gotta pop a real quick question on you. _

** _Alright, shoot._ **

_Okay. So. Uh. Did you see any of…that?_

** _I see all. _ **

_Oh, totally! Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply—I just meant that you probably have a lot to pay attention to so I thought maybe you weren’t—_

** _What is your question? _ **

_Sorry, sorry, I know you’re super busy. Okay. So, well. Here’s my question: that was, like, fine, right? I’m not in trouble or anything?_

** _For what would you be in trouble? _ **

_Oh, I mean. Nothing. I didn’t do anything wrong. But I just thought maybe you thought that it was kind of—I don’t know but I wanted to make sure you knew that I was the one to end it._

** _I already knew that. _ **

_Oh. Of course you did. Shit, sorry, God. I didn’t mean to mansplain to you. Am I using that word right?_

** _Absolutely._ **

_So…I’m not in trouble, then._

** _What do you think?_ **

_I mean, if anything, DENNIS is the one that should be in trouble. _

** _Then why have you called me here?_ **

_Well, I don’t want to be too crass—_

** _Ah. Don’t tell me—the boner. _ **

_...yeah. I’m really sorry about that, but it just kind of happened and I— _

** _Tell me, Mac. Did you want that to happen?_ **

_No! But… _

** _It felt good._ **

_What? No! No. No, that’s not what I—_

** _Really, Mac? Are you really going to try to lie? To ME? _ **

_I’m not lying!_

** _I’m GOD, Mac._ **

_Ugh. Okay, fine. You’re right. I didn’t want it to feel good, but it did. _

** _It must have been difficult to stop doing it, then, if it felt good. _ **

_Huh. I guess it was, yeah. REALLY difficult, actually, which is—wait! So I actually did a GOOD thing, right? Doing something hard is badass. Giving up things that feel good because they’re wrong—that’s like, what you’re all about! Sacrifice! That’s how you know I love you! So that whole thing with Dennis was actually a test of my faith! And I passed! Oh, that makes SO much sense. You know, you’re a pretty cool guy, God. _

** _I’ve been told that a few times. And you are a very good boy, Mac. _ **

_I—I am? _

** _I know you try hard. _ **

_I do! I really do, and I promise I won’t do anything like that again. But, uh, just one more question, real quick—and this is purely hypothetical—if it WERE to happen again…?_

** _..._ **

_God? Are you still there? Did I lose you?_

** _I’m here, Mac. _ **

_Did you hear my question?_

** _..._ **

_Oh. Okay. I get it. It won’t happen again, I promise. And I won’t go bother a priest about this or anything either. Because I passed your test, so. I’ll still go confess for Dennis, though! I mean, Father Richards always says that I’m not supposed to confess for anyone but myself, but Dennis certainly isn’t gonna do it himself, and someone’s gotta watch out for him._

** _Speaking of Dennis, where is he? _ **

_RIght, so, after we got out of the elevator, he ran ahead of me and got into our room before I could get there. He’s been in there for like twenty minutes now. And he’s got both of the room keys, so I’m kind of locked out. _

** _Jeez. Sounds like Dennis is being a real dick._ **

_Oh, man, he SO is! Actually, you know what? If you have a spare second, could you maybe pop a quick punishment on him? You know, for being a dick to me?_

** _I’ll see what I can arrange._ **

_Thanks, dude! You’re the best._

** _No promises, though. _ **

_Of course. I understand. You’re super busy. Well, I’ll let you get back to it, but uh, thanks for taking the time. Oh, and God?_

** _Yes?_ **

_Sweet pecs as always, bro._

** _Yours too, Mac. And your biceps are looking very swole. _ **

_You think so? I mean, they ARE, but no one else has said anything, so… _

** _Oh, for sure. Everyone else is too intimidated to say anything, but you’re putting in the work and it’s definitely showing._ **

_Wow, thanks, God! That means a lot coming from you. Alright. Well, I won’t keep ya. Uh...ciao? I guess?_

Mac lifts his head, murmuring an “Amen,” feeling a little embarrassed. _Ciao_? Ugh. He never knows how to sign off with God without sounding like a total douchebag. 

Just then, the door to room 417 bursts open open and a Dennis-shaped blur dashes out of the room. Mac springs to his feet and catches the door just before it closes, shouting down the hall, “Where are you going?!”

Dennis doesn’t answer, just keeps sprinting. 

“Goddamnit, at least give me the keys, asshole!” 

After hanging a sharp left, Dennis yanks open a door, and then the sound of rapid footsteps echoes from the stairwell—followed by a series of painful-sounding clunks and thumps, and then Dennis shouting “FUCK!”

Mac smiles. God is great.

* * *

After his little chat with the Big Man Upstairs, three-quarters of a bottle of the most expensive red wine on the room-service menu, and an episode of an Animal Planet show about making fancy aquariums, Mac feels a more at-ease about what happened in the elevator. Or at least he’s thinking about it less. Or, well—at least when he _does_ think about it, he’s too tipsy to care. 

His buzz is killed, though, when his phone chimes with a text from the biggest buzzkill in the world, Dee: _What the FUCK you guys?????_

It’s a group text with Dennis, so Mac makes the executive decision to ignore her and let Dennis handle it. He’s better with words.

But a few seconds later, his phone chimes again. It’s Dee again: _You guys MADE OUT_

Less than a second later: _?!?!?!??!?!?!?!?!_

Jesus Christ, how can one woman be so annoying even over text? Mac opens the text thread and types, _Clam down bitch we did NOT make out, _hits send, turns the ringer off, and puts the phone down next to him. 

The phone buzzes again: _STOP LYING TO ME THERE WAS TONGU EI KNO THERE WAS TONGUE CHARLIES ENT ME THE VIDEO_

Oh, God. Overcome with nausea, Mac drops his phone on the bed and buries his face in his hands. Of _course_ there’s video. Why didn’t Mac think of that already? Now he’s gonna have to somehow bribe Charlie into deleting the video forever. It might involve destroying the laptop harddrive with an M-80.

His phone buzzes several times in quick succession before Mac can bring himself to look at it, because Dennis could’ve joined the conversation now and Mac doesn’t really want to read what he has to say. But when Mac finally opens the texts, they’re all from Dee:

_Dennis did you HAVE to STRADDLE Mac _

_Was that 100% necessary_

_EXPLAIN YORUSELVES_

_I swear to GOD if u guys blwo this_

_I will ACTUALLY MURDER you_

_Bot h of u_

_HELLO!!!!_

_EARTH TO DICKWADS_

_!!!!!!!!!_

_SAY SOMETHING_

_SAY SOMETHING_

_SAY SOMETHING_

_SAY SOMETHING_

_SAY SOMETHING_

“Sweet Mother of Christ,” Mac mutters, actually a little concerned that Dee might have finally gone off the deep end. The last three messages all sent after he started reading the earlier ones, and the three bouncy dots suggest that she’s probably going to keep sending the same message until someone responds, and clearly Dennis isn’t going to be any help.

So Mac types: _U have nothing to worry abt. It was all just acting. Nothing sexual. We were just trying 2 get out of the elevater. _

The three bouncy dots disappear for a second. Then: _Are you SURE I have nothing to worry about? _

Mac: _God no_ _it was disgusting_

Dee: _And Dennis thinks it was too rite?_

Mac: _Yeah??? Duh_  
Mac: _I think he threw up after_

Dee: _He did?_

Mac: _I think so _  
Mac: _Idk he was in the bathroom a long time_

Dee: _Did he SAY he barfed tho_

Mac: _Well no not with words_

Dee: _Can u ask him?_

Mac: _No _

Dee: _Can u at least tell him to check his goddamn texts_

Mac: _No_

Dee: _Wtf? Why not? He’s right there isn’t he?_

Mac: _No_

Dee: _What? He’s not with u?_

Mac: _No_

Dee:_ Well where tf is he???_

Mac: _Idk!!!! I’m not his keeper!!!!_

Dee: _U kind of are!!!!_

Mac: _Stfu bird_

Dee: _Where are you right now?_

Mac: _Hotel room_  
Mac: _Watching animal planet_  
Mac: _But dont worry_  
Mac: _I can garintee u, Dennis hated it too _

  
Dee: _Care to weigh in, Dennis?_  
Dee: _Dennis?_  
Dee: _Dennis?_  
Dee: _Dennis_  
Dee: _Dennis_

Mac: _Jesus Chris can’t u do this in a seperate text Dee?_

Dee: _Dennis_  
Dee: _Dennis_  
Dee: _Dennis_  
Dee: _Dennis_  
Dee: _Dennis_

Dennis: _Somebody say my name?_

Dee: _DENNIS_

Dennis: _DEE_

Dee: _You goddamn piece of fucking goddamn shit_  
Dee: _Where the fuck have you been dickhole?????_

Dennis: _Holy shit chill out. I was talking to someone. Sorry I wasn’t available the exact second you texted me._

Mac: _Who were u talking to_

Dennis: _Chick_  
Dennis: _Oh and get this - showed her the dress. Asked her if she saw black and blue or white and gold. Guess what? _  
Dennis: _COLORBLIND_  
Dennis: _Wild, right?_  
Dennis: _Ok ttyl_

* * *

Dennis switches his phone to silent and tucks it into the front pocket of his jeans. Out of sight, out of mind. The bar in the hotel’s restaurant is made of wood stained so dark it’s almost black, solid and sturdy under Dennis’s hands. There are no scratches in it, no cup rings, nothing sticky or greasy, and it’s polished to enough of a shine that he can make out a blurry reflection of himself in it, although the light in the bar is pretty dim, so it’s more of a silhouette, but it’s clear that someone takes good care of this bar.

He’s still feeling the grain of the wood when his hand bumps up against a shot glass. He has only a vague recollection of ordering it, but he slams it anyway. Tequila. Expensive. No lime. No salt. 

Behind the bar are several bottles of liquor, really fancy shit, painstakingly arranged on glass shelves and backlit with a shade of blue a few clicks below neon. The light shines right through the bottles of vodka and gin, turns a muddy green through the scotch and the rum.

There is a piano in the corner of the bar and someone is playing it. Jazz. Frank Sinatra or something. Rat pack shit always transports Dennis to a smoke-filled bar with a tumbler of whiskey in one hand, a dame on the other, a lit Cuban cigar between his teeth, and a fedora on his head. He’s indifferent towards the fantasy; he has no opinion on jazz. But he must admit that the music does serve as an okay distraction, which is key to the system. 

No, not _that_ system. Sure, the D.E.N.N.I.S. System is _kind of_ in play right now, but only as a sub-system, because, believe it or not, there are things more important in life than banging chicks. 

See, Dennis actually has another system that he has been developing and fine-tuning for much longer than he’s been sexually active. No one knows about this system, though. It’s far more complex and nebulous than the D.E.N.N.I.S. System; there aren’t steps, for example, just _parts_, and they don’t have to be executed in any particular order. Many of them can take place at the same time. Some may have to be repeated. It has a lot to do with intuition and instinct, and no one else in the gang has a high enough IQ to be able to pull it off. But when executed with fidelity to the model, Dennis’s Other System has a one-hundred percent success rate.

The first part of the system is D: _Distract Yourself_. After what Dennis will refer to hereafter as “the Event,” you have to make sure your brain never has enough downtime to wander into a bad neighborhood. See, brains are like toddlers: if you leave them unsupervised, they’ll inevitably get into some shit like eating too much aspirin or shoving a Lego up their nose. In order to avoid that, you have to distract them with cartoons, candy, toys, and other shiny things. This step is pretty easy; most activities are actually distractions from the crushing loneliness of being human and the towering inevitability of death. You just need to pick a few and deliberately focus your distraction away the Event itself. Dennis’s pesronal favorite distractions are daytime talk shows, crossword puzzles, scams and schemes, arguments about inconsequential things, and no-strings-attached sex with women. 

Part two is _E: Edit Your Story_. Now, before you start throwing accusations around, Dennis would like to make it clear first and foremost that this step is _not_ about lying. It’s so much more than that. _Lying _is stupid and obvious. You can’t just go around saying, “Oh, The Event never happened,” because people are going to be able to tell if you lie to them. More importantly, _you_ are going to be able to tell if you lie to _yourself_. No, this step is not about lying. This step is about _taking control of your own narrative_. 

Part Two is maybe the oldest part of this system. See, when Dennis was a kid, he was what you might call (and what an elementary school guidance counselor _did_ call) “sensitive.” What that really meant was that he got hurt easily and he got hurt hard and every time it felt like the end of the world. So, he grew up, he did everything in his power to avoid feeling like that. But nothing he did worked a hundred percent of the time. Other people, with their own agendas and opinions and cruelties, always got in the way. 

All this business made Dennis develop a huge, angry grudge against the universe. Why, he would ask no one in particular—or maybe he was asking god, or he maybe was asking the hole where he thought god _should _have been, or maybe he was asking the seed of decay festering deep inside that hole, unkillable because how can you kill something that’s dead to begin with—why should Dennis be forced to suffer for things that weren’t even his fault? Who gave other people the right to hurt him? Who would design a universe like that? How was that fair? 

But that? Well, that’s the thinking of a naive child. Now Dennis understands how reality _actually _works, which is that life isn’t fair and the universe wasn’t designed at all but thrown together randomly and chaotically and with nothing resembling humanity. There was no benevolent god out there worrying about protecting anyone’s feelings. The truth was short and simple: sometimes good people get fucked. The _only _thing you have control over is your own actions. 

And memory is just as much of an action as anything, right? 

So, in the aftermath of the Event, you Edit Your Story. You solidify your point of view, your motivations, your interpretation of events, and arrange the story in an order that makes sense to you. And you shouldn’t feel bad, or like you’re lying, because here’s the thing: _everyone does this_. No one remembers anything one hundred percent correctly. They just don’t realize how wrong they are. They go around believing that their memories are infallible. But Dennis’s system accepts the imperfect chemistry of memory and _uses_ it. Which puts _you _back in the driver’s seat of your life.

You might say, “But Dennis, you said this _wasn’t _about lying. I’ll be remembering things that weren’t true.” It’s a natural response. But how do you _know_ that what you’re remembering isn’t true? We’ve just covered the fact that memory is imperfect, so honestly, whatever you decide to remember _could _be the truth. Who’s to say? And what _is_ truth, anyway? Sure, you could _try_ to find a “fact” that everyone on earth can agree is “true,” but you’d fail, because, much like god or Santa Claus, _truth does not exist_. It’s just some made-up intangible authority meant to imbue a kind of bullshit do-good morality on the masses. So take advantage of the flaws of memory: edit your story and take back control of your life. 

So now that you’ve Edited Your Story, it’s time to move on to Part Three, _N: Numb Yourself, or Narcotics_. We’re talkin’ alcohol, cigarettes, weed, oxycontin, adderall, crack rock, heroin—whatever gets the job done for you. Now, Dennis knows what you’re thinking, and yes, being under the influence of psychoactive chemicals _will_ make it more difficult to control your thoughts. But let’s be real: in the immediate aftermath of the event, sometimes your brain is going to wander into that territory no matter what, even with distractions. And even with your edited version of the Event, it might still be a little painful to recall. There’s nothing you can do about any of that, so you might as well do your remembering while you’re wasted and can’t totally feel it and might not even remember remembering it the next day. 

A quick warning, for legal purposes: Part Three has a slight but nonetheless statistically significant chance of serious side effects, which can include, but are not limited to: dry eyes, dry mouth, sore throat, hypersalivation, unusual dreams, acid reflux, increased perspiration, dry skin, coughing, nausea, vomiting, insomnia, hypersomnia, night terrors, diarrhea, constipation, low appetite, extreme hunger, low blood sugar, lack of ambition, disturbing hallucinations, loss of consciousness, opioid overdose, alcohol poisoning, alcohol withdrawal, suicidal thoughts, cirrhosis, liver failure, cardiac arrest, heart failure, kidney failure, multiple organ failure, brief disconnection with the perception of linear temporal reality, long-term disconnection with the perception of linear temporal reality, death, and (at least as known to the State of California in accordance with Prop. 65) cancer. Exercise caution, or consult a healthcare professional if you wanna be a pussy about it. 

Okay, now that that’s out of the way.

Part Four is _I: Isolate Yourself_. It’s vitally important to be alone as much as you can throughout the entirety of the system. If you spend time around other people, you run the risk of them saying something that reminds you of the Event. Even worse, they might ask you about it directly. This is very dangerous. Outside influences can really muddy up the process. Plus, the less you talk about it, the less other people pay attention to it, meaning that _their_ brains are letting the memory fade without them realizing it, meaning that if you _do _have to talk about the Event in the future, you have a lot more control over how they recall it than they do. So if you can avoid other people, at least people that know you, that’s best. But if you absolutely _must_ be around others, then there’s always… 

Part Five,_ A: Act Like It’s Not A Big Deal_. This step is essentially an emergency contingency plan. In the event that someone asks you about the Event point-blank, you can casually tell them your edited story. And then, if they stick by a version of the Event doesn’t jive with your reality, don’t try to correct them. Don’t fight them with logic. Instead, here’s what you’re gonna do: play it like you don’t give a shit either way. Who cares what they think happened? Certainly not _you_. That would mean that it _mattered_. And it doesn’t. Because you’ve… 

_L: Let It Go_. The sixth and final part of the system. This part seems simple, but it’s actually the most difficult step of them all. This is because you only _truly_ let something go when you completely stop thinking about it. The second you find yourself saying, “Huh, I haven’t thought about that thing in a while, I must have let it go,” well, guess what, buddy? You’re thinkin’ about it again. Which means that the Event has still got a bit of a hold on you. So, yeah, you’ll have to be a little patient with this step. It can take a while. But Dennis urges you to trust the system, because time will keep going forward, putting more and more space between the Event and you. The past is in the past, and no matter how awful or scary or confusing it is, it cannot hurt you from there. 

You just have to follow these simple steps. And that’s exactly what Dennis intends to do tonight.

He slams one more shot of tequila and signals to the busty colorblind bartender for another. 

* * *

Dee hadn’t been able to get Dennis to respond to any of her texts or calls since he told her and Mac that he was flirting with some colorblind bimbo in an unspecified location. Dennis finding a girl to flirt with _immediately _after making out with Mac should be a good sign, she knows. But it feels oddly ominous, even if she can’t quite articulate why. 

After maybe the fiftieth unanswered text to Dennis, she throws her phone down on the couch so hard that it bounces off the cushion and lands on the floor with a thunk. She picks it up; it’s not broken, but it’s going to be a miracle if her phone survives the weekend. 

She has completely failed to focus on the _Law and Order _rerun she had turned on to distract herself. Even Jerry Orbach isn’t comforting her like he normally does, which is a sure sign that things are _very _bad. Sitting around isn’t doing her any good. She knows she has to _do_ something. And that’s why, one thirty-minute bus ride later, she’s standing propped up on her crutches in front of a grungy brownstone apartment in a shitty neighborhood, holding a mini-cooler with one hand and chucking rocks at a grimy second-floor window with the other.

A light turns behind the window and Dee sighs in relief, but when it slides open with the screech of old wood on old wood, it’s not at all who she was expecting. Instead, a scrawny old man in a sweat-stained, ill-fitting wife beater leans out of the window and scans the ground, alarmed. 

Maybe if Dee doesn’t move, he won’t see her?

The old man stares right at her for a full five seconds and Dee starts to think maybe he really _can’t_ see her. But then he shouts in a thick Russian accent, “You are throwing fucking _rocks_ at my window?”

Dee cocks her head, wide-eyed, pretending like she just noticed him. She looks over her shoulder like she’s trying to find whoever he’s talking to. 

“Yes, I am talking to you!” he shouts. “You are throwing fucking _rocks_?”

“No—no, that wasn’t me,” she stammers. 

“You are holding rock!”

She looks at the hand she’s pointing with, which, yes, does have a rock in it. “Uh…no.”

“You think you can _lie_ at me? I am ex-KGB and you think you can _lie _at me with rock _in hand_?”

“Okay, okay! I’m sorry!”

The old man reaches up to close the window. “You stop throwing rocks at window, prostitute,” he says with finality. 

“Whoa! Okay, I’m not a _prostitute_, guy.” 

He pauses to scan her up and down. “Okay, sorry, maybe…white trash hooker. This is better for you?”

“I’m not—I’m not _white trash_! I’m just trying to get in touch with my friend. She lives in this building. I thought this was her window.”

“What is name of girl?”

Oh. Shit.“Uh…Waitress?”

“_Waitress_? What kind of name is this, _Waitress_?”

“Okay obviously that’s not her name, but she has, like, short blonde hair—or—well, I guess it might be brown now, and maybe longish, I don’t know, I haven’t seen her in a while and she changes it a lot, but—”

The Waitress pokes her head out of the window directly above the old Russian man. “Dee?”

Oh, thank god. “Hey girl!” Dee waves up to her, plastering on a big old charming grin. 

“What the fuck are you doing here?” the Waitress shouts.

Dee hesitates. “Look, can you just come down?” 

“No! God, you’re worse than Charlie.”

The old Russian man leans out the window and looks up at the Waitress. “Prostitute knows the Charlie? You want I should call cops?”

“No, you don’t need to do that, Yaroslav,” the Waitress sighs, annoyed.

“Okay. Then I go to fucking sleep.” Yaroslav slides the window shut.

Dee laughs. “Cranky old bitch, isn’t he?” 

Yaroslav’s window slams open with a bang. “You say this to my face, white trash hooker!” he shouts, pointing a fucking _shotgun_ out his window. Dee yelps and throws her hands up in the air, her crutches and the cooler clattering to the ground. 

“Oh, goddamnit, Yaroslav, put away the shotgun,” the Waitress says in a weary voice that suggests this isn’t the first time he’s pulled a weapon on someone. Yaroslav shrugs and retreats back into his apartment, sliding the window shut again. 

“What do you want, Dee?” the Waitress calls down. “No, actually, you know what? I’m not going to get involved in whatever insane shit you’re doing.”

“You won’t get involved in anything! I promise!” Dee assures her. “I just—”

“’Ey, Romeo! Shut da fuck up!” This comes from the window to the right of the Waitress’s, in which appears a shirtless skinny white dude with a buzz cut, a tribal neck tattoo, and a Monster Energy Drink trucker hat.

And then, of course, Yaroslav opens his window again. “She is not Romeo, she is prostitute!” 

“Oh, youse a hooker?” Monster Energy asks her with sudden interest. “How much?”

“She is white trash hooker,” Yaroslav yells up to him. “I think high-class at first but she has crutch and arm sling, so I think she is needing moneys.”

“Word, word. I’ll give you, uh…” Monster Energy pulls out his wallet and checks inside. “Twenty…six bucks for a handy-J?”

“Ex_cuse_ me?!” Dee shouts. “I’ll have you know that a man once paid me seven hundred dollars just to look at my _feet_, so—”

“Oh, youse a foot girl?”

“Oh, she is foot girl?”

“Both of you, shut up!” The Waitress shouts. “Jesus! Just go to the door, Dee. I’ll buzz you up.” 

“Wait wait wait but I can’t go up the stairs—” It’s too late. The Waitress’s window is already shut. “Oh, goddammit.” 

* * *

It takes her a little while, but Dee manages to pick up her crutches and the mini-cooler, hobble her way up the stoop, through the building’s heavy front door, and up three flights of stairs. Sweating profusely, she bangs on the Waitress’s door with one of her crutches. 

The Waitress answers, but doesn’t move aside to let Dee in. She doesn’t even say anything at all, no hello or anything; she just folds her arms and cocks her head, challenging Dee to explain herself.

Breathing heavily, Dee says, “What kind of a bitch makes a girl on crutches walk up three flights of stairs?”

“Why are you here?”

“Um, okay, hello, nice to see you too.”

“Goodbye, Dee.” The Waitress makes to shut her door. 

“Wait wait wait!” Dee holds the door open. “I need a favor.”

“No,” the Waitress says. 

“But you don’t know what it is yet!”

“It doesn’t matter what it is.”

“I need your car.”

The Waitress smiles calmly. “I don’t have a car.” 

“Yes, you do.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Then what are those car keys hanging on your wall?” 

The Waitress looks where Dee is pointing and pauses for _just_ a second too long. 

“Gotcha bitch!” Dee says, smug. She holds out her hand. “Gimme.” 

“No.”

“Aw, come on, _please_? Seriously, it’s an emergency. Keys. Hurry up.” She opens and closes her hand a bunch of times in an attempt to get the Waitress to speed up.

“No. Nope. Uh-uh. No chance.”

“But—why not?!”

“Oh, gee, I don’t know. Maybe because you’ve crashed every car you’ve ever owned for the last ten years?”

“No no no but that wasn’t _me_!” Dee protests. “Every single time it was Mac or Charlie! And—and one time it was this runaway twink I picked up who was hitchhiking to Hollywood to do gay porn but it was never _me_! I’m a great driver!”

“Yeah? Well, I have other reasons.”

“Oh yeah? Name _one_.”

“Really? You want me to name some reasons?”

“Yes, I want you to name some reasons.”

“Okay, I’m gonna name some reasons.” The Waitress counts them off on her fingers. “One: you’re not on my insurance. Two: you’re a complete bitch to me every single time you see me. Three: despite my efforts to _not_ be seen by you or your freak friends, all of you somehow find me, _constantly_, and my life gets worse every single time you do. Four: I don’t think you know how to drive stick. Five: I hate you. Six: you—”

“Okay!” Dee stops her. “I get it, okay?”

“Great.” 

“So in that case…maybe _you _should drive me.”

“Most of the reasons I just listed are also reasons why I’m not going to drive you.”

“Pretty please?” Dee pouts and throws in a couple of eyelash-bats for good measure. “I’ll be your best friend…” 

The Waitress crosses her arms across her chest. “I don’t need a best friend.”

“Yes, you do,” Dee says. “You don’t have a best friend.”

Lifting her chin and giving a haughty toss of her hair, the Waitress states, “I’m actually working on being my _own_ best friend these days.” 

“Oh my _god _that sucks.” Dee groans, her eyeballs rolling so hard they might as well be on ecstasy.

The Waitress puts her hand on the doorknob. “Good night, Dee.” 

Dee sticks one of her crutches in front of the door to stop it from shutting and cries, “Okay! Fine! I’ll give you fifty bucks.”

The Waitress scoffs. “You expect me to drive you around in the middle of the night for _fifty bucks_?”

“Seventy-five?”

The Waitress folds her arms, scanning Dee up and down. “One-fifty.”

“Ugh, _really_?”

“Final offer.” 

Dee purses her lips. “Fine. One-fifty. I’ll give you a hundred and fifty dollars if you drive me.”

“Okay.”

“Good girl. Now go get your jacket! We gotta hit the pavement! Chop-chop!” 

* * *

To the right of the hotel bar, there’s a large aquarium with half a dozen tropical fish in it, all different colors, brilliant colors—blues, oranges, yellows. Dennis has been staring at it for the better part of an hour. 

It must be so dangerous for those fish in the wild, being so bright, he thinks. So easy for predators to spot. Then again, the fish they had seen in the factory the other day were all a dull gray, which should be a kind of protection from predators. And yet there they were, slaughtered and gutted en masse by humans. So maybe the lesson is that if you’re born a fish, you’re just shit out of luck no matter what color you are. 

Except for maybe those badass fish that live in the deep, deep ocean, the fish that god forgot, the ones that have spikes and hundreds of sharp teeth and glow in the dark. If Dennis had to be a fish, he would want to be one of those motherfuckers. Actually, you know what, fuck hypotheticals. He _does_ want to be one of those motherfuckers, a fish living in the Marianas Trench, luring in smaller, dumber sea creatures using a light hanging on the end of that strange dangly appendage—you know the kind—and then eating them alive. And in the bottom of the deep sea, Dennis would have no cares in the world beyond hunting and eating, because he’d be a thousand miles away from any human being and no one would be able to find him or talk to him or touch him ever again. And because he’d be a fish and fish probably don’t have too many thoughts. 

“Do those fish have names?”

The cute colorblind bartender, a brunette in her early twenties, looks up at him, frowns, and then glances at the tank. “I don’t know. If they do, no one’s ever told me them.”

Dennis nods and slams another shot of tequila Maybe his fifth or sixth. He chases it with a swallow of beer. “You think anyone eats fish like that?”

“Uh, I’m not sure.” She giggles in that way girls do when they’re trying to figure out if you’re funny-haha or funny-weird. “Probably someone does. Or has. People will eat anything.” 

Dennis nods again, still staring at the tank. The fish are swimming. Or maybe his vision is.

“Really?” The bartender wrinkles her nose. Cute like a chipmunk. 

“Hm?” 

“He drinks _paint_?”

Oh. He must’ve said something about Charlie. Dennis chuckles. “I’m not even sure that’s the weirdest thing he’s eaten, to be honest. He eats cat food on a daily basis.”

“You’re joking.”

“I really wish I was.” 

She’s decided Dennis is funny-haha, he can tell from the way she’s trying not to smile when she talks. “Why does he eat _cat food_?” 

Dennis shakes his head, playfully rueful. “You’re asking the wrong person, babe.”

The bartender giggles again. She’s a giggler, then. Gigglers are good. Easy to amuse. Easy to flatter. Easy in general. She pours a brownish drink out of a shaker into a highball glass with some sort of reddish spice on the rim. 

“Nice technique,” he says, nodding at the drink. She cocks her head questioningly, so he explains, “I’m a bartender too.”

“Oh!” Her shoulders square a little and she bites her lip, trying even harder to hide her smile. Small compliment, drastic impact. She must not get them a lot—use that. “I’m just following the recipes. I’m not doing anything special.”

“No way. You’ve got finesse, know what I mean?” (She doesn’t, but who gives a shit.) “You’ve clearly gone through some kind of training.”

“I actually haven’t. In fact, this is my first bartending job.” 

“No. You’re kidding.”

“I’m not!” Giggling again, she bows her head and tucks some hair behind her ear. Okay, jackpot.

“Well, then, you’re a natural.”

She’s blushing a little now. “Oh my god, stop messing with me!”

“I will not!” Dennis says, hand over his heart, pretending to take offense. “I’m serious, with skills like that, along with that cute little smile of yours, I mean, you could make a killing in Atlantic City, easy. Vegas, even.”

“Vegas?!” She actually laughs at that—lower than a giggle, more adult. “Yeah, right.” 

Dennis raises his hands in a mix between a shrug and surrender. “Fine, don’t believe me. I’m just sayin’, you got that it-factor.” 

A waiter stops by the bar, and the bartender slides the brownish martini drink to him, then looks at Dennis. _Regards_ him, really. Evaluating his sexual capabilities, no doubt. “Can I make you a drink?” she asks at last.

“I’d be honored.”

She busies herself with making the drink, but angles her body in a way that Dennis can’t see what she’s doing. “I’ve been wanting to make this drink for, like, forever. Like since I started working here. But no one has ever ordered it.”

“What drink is it?”

“You’ll see!” she says, flashing him a dimpled grin over her shoulder. After about a minute more of prep, she says, “Done!”

She slides the drink in front of him. It’s something in a martini glass, darkish red and bubbly, with a few olives skewered on a toothpick resting over the rim. “What is this?” Dennis asks.

“Oh, come on, you’ll know it,” she says. “Just drink it!”

Dennis makes a surprised noise when the awful, bitter taste of the drink hits his tongue, but quickly forces it into something resembling a sound of approval. 

The bartender watches him with hopeful doe eyes and full, pouty lips. “Is it good?”

Dennis forces himself to swallow. “Yeah! It’s, uh. Not was I was expecting! But it’s—great.”

She grins. “Do you know what it is?”

“You know what, I think I’m blanking on it.”

“It’s an Old Spanish.”

“Ah, right. Uh, remind me what’s in that one again?”

“Red wine, tonic water, and olives.”

Dennis’s stomach heaves in protest. That _cannot _be a real drink. “Oh yeah. Classic.”

“Ooh, I’m so glad you like it!” She jumps up and down a little and claps her hands together.

“Uh-huh,” Dennis lies. “It’s very well-made.” He holds the glass by the stem and swirls the drink around. Bubbles cling to the olives and he realizes: if he wants to get laid tonight, then he’s gonna have to choke down this swill, and he is suddenly overcome with a wave of enormous exhaustion. So many steps to get through. He quickly weighs his options and asks, “What time do you get off?”

Her smile falters a bit. “Um, like ten?” 

“You live near here?”

“Why do you want to know?” she asks, guarded.

Dennis has abruptly lost control of the fishing line; the catch is swimming in the other direction and is a lot faster and stronger than he thought. He tries to reel it back in. “I thought we could go have sex.”

She looks even more confused now. “But _why_?” 

“Because you’re hot.” Dennis gestures to her body, and he can hear his voice slurring but he’s also more than a little pissed off because, like, come on, she _must _know that she’s hot. She’s just fishing for compliments. 

But no—she arches an eyebrow at him and asks, “Didn’t you _just _get engaged?”

“Ah, shit,” Dennis drops his arm on the bar with a heavy thump. “You know about that?”

“Of _course_ I know about it! The entire hotel staff knows about it, it’s all we’re talking about! I’ve seen the video from like ten different angles! It was all over the hotel’s Snapchat!”

“Okay, but listen, I’m not—that wasn’t actually—”

“Gross,” she says, stopping him with her hand and more grossed-out dismissiveness than Dennis has experienced since _Clueless_ came out. “You should go.”

She starts to retreat to the other end of the bar, and Dennis slides off his stool to follow her. “No, you don’t understand, that guy isn’t—we’re not—” 

The bartender stops and spins around, her long brown hair whipping around to follow. “I really thought you were nice, you know that? But you’re just like the rest of them.”

“But—but—I’m _not_, though!” Dennis insists. 

“_How_?”

Dennis tries to call to mind his many uniquely excellent qualities, but he’s definitely drunk now and his vocabulary has fucked off to god knows where, so all he comes up with is: “I’m really good at sex!” 

The filter in the fish tank burbles, infuriatingly cheerful. Dishes and silverware clank together faintly in the kitchen. Jazz piano twinkles in background. The bartender stares at him.

“You know what I think?” she says after a moment, her voice quieter now and yet somehow scarier. “I think you need to take a long, hard look at yourself. Because not only is there someone capable of loving you, you also _found _him. I have no idea _how_, because frankly you seem pretty terrible, but you did. Do you know how rare that is? Why would you throw all that away just to have sex with some girl whose name you don’t even know?”

“But—then what was all the giggling? And the blushing?!”

She puts her hands on her hips, suddenly all business. “Okay, you need to get out of here before I get my manager.”

Dennis gapes for a second, waiting for her to change her mind, then gives up with a shake of his head and a humorless laugh. “Fine. I’ll go, just give me the rest of that tequila.”

“You’d have to pay for it.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, do I _look_ like I can’t pay for it?” Dennis sneers. He leans over the bar to grab the tequila himself. “Charge it to my room. 417.”

And Dennis staggers out of restaurant, he realizes: he’s not even disappointed. She was ugly anyway. 

* * *

Dee climbs into the passenger’s seat in the Waitress’s gray 1999 Honda Civic and is frankly _delighted_ to discover that the Waitress’s car is a shithole. 

The Waitress pulls out of her parking spot on the street, and Dee works at kicking around the trash at her feet—empty soda cups, fast food bags and boxes, crumpled receipts, a banana peel—to make room for the mini-cooler. While she’s down there, she notices a white paper bag just under her seat and she can’t help but laugh. “Oh my god, there’s just a bag of old donuts under the seat!”

“Oh, I actually think those are still good. Can you give me one?” The Waitress holds out her hand to Dee without taking her hands off the wheel.

“Ew, you’re gonna eat trash donuts?”

“They’re not trash donuts,” says the Waitress. “I _just_ said they were still good. I got them like two weeks ago.” 

“Ugh. Fine.” Cautiously, Dee reaches into the crumpled, grease-stained bag while trying not to touch the sides. She pinches one of the mini donuts (or “donettes,” according to the packaging) between her thumb and forefinger as though it were contaminated—and it kind of is, because it’s covered in powdered sugar, which gets everywhere so easily that it might as well be considered a kind of infection. She drops the donette in the Waitress’s palm and wipes her fingers on the edge of the Waitress’s seat. The Waitress, however, shoves the entire donette into her mouth without any hesitation. The sugar gets all over her lips, chin, and black hoodie from Planned Parenthood.

“Classy,” Dee snorts. 

“Oh, fuck off, Dee.” A fine mist of donette and powdered sugar sprays all over the steering wheel. “I know you waited to fart until after you got in the car.”

“Ha!” Dee smirks proudly. “Yeah, I did. Good prank, right?” 

The Waitress swallows the donette and wipes her mouth with the sleeve of her sweatshirt, getting a smear of white powder there as well. “I’m not sure that’s technically a prank so much as it is just a gross thing to do.”

Dee waves her off, unbothered by the comment. “Nah, it’s a prank. You just don’t get comedy.”

They merge onto the highway, and the faster the car goes, the calmer Dee feels, because at least she’s making progress. She’s _doing _something. She’s in control again. 

After the car gets up to highway speed, the Waitress asks, “So, what exactly is this emergency? And why couldn’t one of your terrible friends help you out?”

“Oh. Um. They’re out of town.”

“And?”

“Andthat’s why they couldn’t help me.”

“No, I mean what’s the emergency?”

Dee shifts around in her seat. The whole situation is so goddamn stupid that the second the Waitress knew the details, she’d probably shove Dee out of the moving car and do a U-turn on the highway, traffic laws be damned. “It’s a, um. Financial emergency,” she says finally. Which isn’t a _total _lie. Apartments do cost money. 

“What kind of financial emergency happens on a Saturday night?”

“Eh, it’s complicated,” Dee dismisses the question with a wave. “Has to do with finances and stuff.”

“Oooh, _wow_, your financial emergency has to do with _finances_! Couldn’t have guessed _that_.” 

“Oh my god, you’re such a bitch.” It’s not really an insult, the way Dee says it. She’s just stating a fact. 

After a second, Dee hears the steady _tick tick tick _of the blinker. The Waitress is merging into an exit lane. “Wait, wait—what are you doing? This isn’t our exit.”

“Oh, I know. It’s just that I realized that I actually _don’t_ want to spend four hours in a car with someone who’s going to verbally abuse me the entire time.”

“_Verbal abuse_?” Dee cries, laughing. It’s the most absurd thing she’s ever heard. “What verbal abuse?!”

“Seriously, Dee? You _just _called me a bitch. Like two seconds ago.”

“But you _are_ a bitch!”

“Oh my god. _How _are you this un-self-aware?”

“But—I meant, like, you’re a bitch in a _good_ way! Like, ‘Oh, hey bitch!’” Dee puts on a valley-girlish voice and gives the Waitress’s shoulder a playful shove. 

The Waitress stays in the exit lane. 

Shit, shit, shit. This can’t be happening, they can’t turn back now. Dee doesn’t have enough time to find someone else to drive her. She doesn’t even _know_ anyone else with a car. Shit, shit, shit. “Okay!” she cries. “Okay, I’ll be nice to you, I promise I’ll be nice to you for the rest of the trip, just please, _please_ get back on the highway.”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep.” 

“I can keep this one, I swear! And—and I’ll still give you the money, don’t forget about the money!” 

The Waitress looks at Dee for as long as she can before she has to look back at the road. 

“What if I make it two-fifty?” Dee asks, cringing inwardly as the words leave her mouth; she’s not sure if she actually has two hundred and fifty dollars in her checking account right now. But fuck it, that’s a problem for Future Dee. “Two hundred and fifty whole American dollars. Come on, that’s gotta be like half of your rent, right?”

A muscle in the Waitress’s jaw twitches. “More like a third, but—fine.”

“Oh thank god,” Dee sighs in relief as the Waitress merges out of the exit lane. 

“But you _have _to benice to me. Don’t forget.” 

“I’m not gonna forget! I was just gonna say that your, you know, your ears are very…round.”

The Waitress frowns. “Well, that’s…weird, but it’s not exactly an insult, so I guess that’s progress.”

“Hell yeah, it is!” Dee grins and gives the Waitress’s upper arm a playful thwack. She settles back in the seat and rifles through her purse until she finds a nip of Jack Daniels, and the familiar hurts-so-good burn of the whiskey hits her right under the ears as she swallows. Grimacing, she offers the tiny bottle to the Waitress. “Want some?”

“Uh, no, thanks.”

“Ah, come on, live a little!” 

“Dee. I’m an alcoholic.”

“So? I am too but you don’t see me bein’ a pussy about it.”

“I’m _driving_.”

Shrugging, Dee leans back in the seat and plants her sneakered feet up on the dashboard. “Whatever. Pussy.”

They don’t say anything for a while after that. After a minute, the Waitress turns on the radio to a classic rock station. “Hotel California” is playing. Dee snorts. How appropriate. The highway is mostly empty, and out of the corner of her eye, Dee notices that the Waitress keeps glancing at her in that quick way people do when you’re driving, little peeks before looking back at the road, taking a bunch of snapshots and piecing them together to get a full picture.

Finally, Dee snaps, “What?”

In a quiet, tentatively gentle voice, the Waitress asks, “Did you just tell me that you’re an alcoholic?”

“Oh, don’t tell me you’re shocked by that.”

The Waitress smiles sympathetically. Dee doesn’t like it. “No, of course I’m not surprised. I just didn’t expect to ever hear you admit it.”

“Well, I mean, if I go without alcohol for more than a day, I get sick, which—correct me if I’m wrong—is like the scientific definition of alcoholism.” Dee refuses to take this subject in any way but analytically. 

“It is,” the Waitress says. She seems surprised.

“What? I’m not stupid.”

“I didn’t say you were,” the Waitress says softly. “I’m just—you know. Happy for you. Because admitting it is the first step.”

“First step? To what?”

“First step to quitting.” The Waitress glances at her again, then back at the road. “You know. To getting sober.”

The laugh that comes out of Dee’s throat is louder than she intended. “Oh, I’m not trying to get _sober_. I mean, sure, I’m an alcoholic, but that doesn’t mean I have to _do_ anything about it. They pretend like you do, in health class and at the doctor’s office and on _Lifetime_ movies and stuff? But you don’t _have_ to.”

“But—don’t you think that it’s hurting your loved ones?” 

“Loved ones!” Dee repeats, highly amused. “You’re talkin’ about, like, Frank and Mac and shit? Charlie and Dennis? I’m not hurting them with my drinking. Are you kidding me? They’re all alcoholics, too!” Of course, technically she _has_ hurt them with her drinking. Several times, in fact. But they’ve all injured each other while under the influence. They’ve just accepted it as part of the package of being around each other. It’s either that or crushing loneliness. “I’m not sure they even count as ‘loved ones.’ They’re just…geographically convenient.” 

The Waitress bites her lip. Doesn’t seem like she knows what to say to that. Good.

Dee goes back to staring out the window and avoids looking to her left, because that might encourage the Waitress to talk more about alcoholism and sobriety and other boring shit. 

Whenever Dee is riding in a car, she always imagines a little horse running alongside the road, jumping from road signs to trees to other cars, leaping over obstacles. She does it without thinking; she’s been doing it for as long as she can remember, since she was a little kid. Sometimes, when she was younger, the horse would crash into things, and she couldn’t stop it from happening, even though the whole thing was in her head. Now that she’s older, however, the horse never crashes. Even when she remembers that it’s a possibility, the horse keeps cantering along. 

The Waitress’s shitty car rumbles and rattles. The heater hums. The radio plays softly. She hasn’t eaten in a few hours, so the whiskey is getting to her faster than usual, a pleasant, steamy warmth spreading up her neck and over her face. Dee finally risks a peek to her left and watches as the shadows on the Waitress’s face shift rapidly as the lights of the city zoom past, giving Dee the semi-drunken impression that she’s watching a timelapse video of the sun rising and setting over and over again. She looks back out the passenger’s side window and pulls another burning swallow of whiskey from the bottle.

It occurs to Dee that she successfully avoided having to tell the Waitress why they’re driving up to the Poconos on Saturday night, but pretending to be asleep for the rest of the trip would be a good way to avoid further questioning. So Dee takes one last swallow of whiskey, screws the cap back on, and closes her eyes as she leans her head against the cold glass of the window. 

After an indeterminate stretch of time—but long enough for Dee to actually start drifting off—the Waitress says, “I think I know what you mean. About—about how your friends are just people that happen to be around.”

Dee works hard to keep the muscles in her face relaxed, like they would be if she was actually asleep. She has a feeling that the Waitress is about to get weird and, like, emotional, and Dee doesn’t want to be obligated to respond. 

“I’ve actually—I’ve kind of felt that way my whole life? Like, sure, I have _some _friends, but I wonder if I’m actually meeting people that really _get_ me. I don’t know. I used to believe in soulmates and stuff, but these days, I don’t know anymore. Because even if I met someone that seemed perfect for me, it’s like…it’s just _so easy_ to lie. So how can I really know they’re perfect for me? Maybe they’re just pretending to agree with me. I mean, I’ve done that. I think everyone does that sometimes.”

The Waitress pauses, and Dee prays that that’s the end of this little rant or whatever. But she keeps going, her voice sounding even sadder now: “And even if they _are _actually being honest, even if we’re _both _being honest, how can I know for _sure_ that one person hears exactly what I’m saying? At first I thought maybe that was just a ‘me’ thing, like maybe it was only _me_ who had trouble with finding honest people, or with being honest myself, but…I don’t know. These days I just kind of feel like maybe being a person is just lonely. Like, we’re born alone and we live alone and we try as hard as we can to feel like we’re not alone but then we all end up dying alone, really, and that’s just kind of the deal we get. You know what I mean?” 

Dee can tell when the Waitress looks at her; there’s a certain shift in the way the sound bounces around the inside of the car. 

“Oh.” The Waitress breathes out and the car falls into silence again. 

Dee has _never _heard the Waitress talk that much. Goddamn, was it depressing. 

A few minutes later, in the suspended reality between awake and asleep that you can get stuck in when you doze off in a moving car or a plane or some other in-between place, Dee dreams that she and the Waitress are swimming around in a dirty, uncleaned fishbowl, chasing each other in the brackish water, diving through a fake plastic sandcastle and burrowing in fake plastic plants. In the ragged edges of her perception, Dee’s vaguely aware that a Pink Floyd song is playing on the car radio in real life, and it’s not actually the one about swimming around in a fishbowl, but there they are anyway, Dee and the Waitress—breathing underwater, paddling in circles, _just_ barely missing each other by infuriating fractions of seconds, over and over and over again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me?? projecting my mental illnesses and behavioral health disorders onto characters in a sitcom in which danny devito slithers naked out of a couch on christmas? it's more likely than u think 
> 
> lmfao anyway...thanks for reading <3


	7. "Blame It on the Steak Juice"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mac and Dennis get drunk. Frank and Charlie's scheme intersects with Dee's.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> idk guys! this chapter is VERY goofy and a LITTLE tender. just like life! so. enjoy? there's more mac and dennis in this chapter than the last one though! lol
> 
> i should probably proofread this one more time but i'm sick of looking at it, so again, if you notice and typos or like, factual inconsistencies, PLEASE PLEASE tell me! i'm serious, i'd really appreciate it. :) 
> 
> **Content warnings:** canon-typical comedic violence and a very jokey mention of incest; it’s nothing worse than would be on the show and does not condone it, but it’s there. Once you get to the word "cockblocking," you can skip a few lines and you'll skip it. :)

_Previously… _

Mac clears things up with God while Dennis tries to seduce the hotel’s cute colorblind bartender. She rejects him because she thinks he’s engaged to Mac and admonishes him for throwing away something so rare and special just to sleep with a random girl. 

Meanwhile, Dee finds out about the elevator kiss and bribes the Waitress into driving her to the hotel so she can keep a closer eye on things. 

_And now, Chapter 7: "Blame It on the Steak Juice"_

* * *

In Mac’s experience, there’s a stage of being drunk where you feel _perfect_: toasty and cozy, everything is funny, your lips go a little numb, and the room isn’t spinning yet but your vision is pleasantly fuzzy and everything looks like it’s already your favorite memory. The first time Mac drank enough alcohol to hit that stage (which wasn’t much, because he was eleven and weighed 70 pounds), the only thing he could think was How do I feel like this forever? 

So far this evening, Mac has had three bottles of expensive room-service red wine, and it’s a little past midnight now, and he’s working on a fourth, and he’s just gone past that sweet spot and so the world is now a little darker, a little sadder, a little harder to understand. His attention fades in and out on the TV, still on Animal Planet because he can’t figure out how to work the remote anymore. It’s playing some show about rescuing cats that have climbed up trees and gotten stuck. 

God never gives people more than they can handle (Mac knows that) but so then why do cats climb up trees they can’t get down from? Does God not care about cats? Did Jesus die for cats? Do cats go to heaven? But God doesn’t love questions (Mac knows that too) and Mac has already met his questions quota for the day (maybe even the week, possibly the month), so all he can do for now is to let the thoughts to ping-pong around his head until they tire themselves out. (Every so often the memory of Dennis on top of him (the sounds he made, the weight, the heat) slips in and then nothing feels real.) 

The door to the hotel room unlocks and bangs open. Mac sits up and tries to get his wits about him as Dennis comes stumbling into the room, a half-empty bottle of tequila in his hand. He stops in his tracks to do a dumb little drunken cha-cha and says in a too-loud voice, “Guess who’s drunk!” 

“I guess Dennis.” 

“You guessed right!” 

Before Mac can make room for him, Dennis hurls himself onto the twin bed, which creaks in protest. The tequila bottle ends up crushed underneath Dennis, and one of his legs lands haphazardly hitched up over Mac’s thighs. 

Mac shoves the leg off. Dennis puts it right back. 

“Get off me, bro,” Mac slurs, again trying to shove Dennis away, but Dennis presses his leg into Mac’s thighs with the kind of strength that Dennis doesn’t have when he’s sober, and Mac can't move him. “What’re you doing, dude?”

“Stretchin’ m’hips,” Dennis slurs into the pillow.

“Okay well can you do it, like, not on top of me?” 

Dennis doesn’t move his leg, just twists his head to the side to stare at Mac. His eyes are glassy and bloodshot, his mouth parted slightly. “I drank a lot of my steak juice,” he says, as though that’s an explanation. 

The room spins around Dennis’s lips. Mac blinks a few times until it stops. “Your _steak _juice?”

“Nooo,” Dennis shakes his head fervently against the pillow, leaving behind a smear of makeup on the white fabric. “_My steak juice_.”

“The fuck is _steak juice_?”

“Dude, _no_, c’mon, you’re not _listening _to me.” With great effort, Dennis pushes himself up onto his elbows and over-enunciates: “_Mis. Stake. Juice_.”

“Oooh, _mistake _juice.” Mac is proud of the two of them for communicating effectively. Or he is, until he realizes that he doesn’t know what the fuck Dennis is talking about. “Wait, what’s _mistake juice_?” 

Dennis reaches under his stomach and produces the bottle of tequila, shoving it clumsily into Mac’s chest. “Ta-da! Mistake juice.”

“Tequila?”

Dennis faceplants back into the pillow and nods into it. 

Mac holds the bottle in his hands, looking between it and Dennis. Mistake juice? What the hell does that mean? Did Dennis drink it and then make a mistake? Or was Mac the mistake that _made _him drink it? Mac’s skull feels like the bottle in his hand and his brain feels like the tequila sloshing around in it. Dennis doesn’t like questions almost as much as God. “Y’should go to sleep, dude, you’re wasted.” 

“_Mac_,” Dennis says, loud and insistent and muffled by the pillow.

“What?”

“List’n to me. List’n.”

“Okay.”

“Nonono, _listen_ to me.” Dennis pushes himself up onto his elbows again, then onto his hands, crawling up so his face is close to Mac’s. Mac recoils at the pungent stench of hard liquor on Dennis’s breath. 

“I’m listening, dude, what is it?”

“I need you to know something.”

“Um.” Mac swallows hard. “Okay?” 

Dennis stares at Mac for a few seconds, his mouth slack and hanging open, and then makes a face like Oh Shit Did I Leave The Oven On? “Oh shit dude! We never got that couple’s massage!” 

Mac’s brain short circuits and the room tilts and his tongue weighs a thousand pounds. 

“Thass not what I wanna say though,” Dennis flaps a hand dismissively. “S’not important. What I _wanna _say is this and I’m gonna say it and it’s this: you are not special.” Dennis falls on to the bed again, this time rolling over and landing on his back with a _whump_. It’s not until Dennis’s leg is gone that Mac remembers it had been on his lap the entire time. 

“Uh?” is the only sound Mac can get himself to make.

“It’s like, you’re _you_, y’know?” Dennis says, his eyes scrunched shut like it’s taking a lot of work to explain this. “’N tha’s cool ’n all, but s’not like I _need _you.”

“Uh?” Dennis is drunker than Mac, but Mac is still too drunk for this. 

“Noooo, don’t be sad, Mac.” Dennis turns his head, and his lips are so_—_Mac doesn’t know. They’re just so _there_.“It’s jus’ that—you ’n me, we’re nothing special.”

Less than six hours ago, Mac was touching those lips. With his lips. “We’re best friends though,” he says. 

“Yeah, okay, but d’you _seriously _think that if you got to live in like a million zillion different universes you’d never meet a single other person you liked more’n y’like me?” 

“You—you’re drunk, Dennis, you’re not making sense—”

“Because if I got to live in like a million zillion universes? I know I’d find _tons _of guys I like more than I like you.” Dennis nuzzles his cheek into his pillow, looking for all the world like a sleepy baby. “I don’t even _need _the multiverse, dude. I bet I could find a shit tonna guys jus’ in regular ol’ Phildalph—Philapholph—Phlelphiadia—”

“...Philadelphia?”

“Philadelphia!” Dennis squints at Mac and smiles Mac gave him a kitten instead of helping him say a word. His hand reaches up by Mac’s face, and Mac freezes, his heart pounds, and then Dennis very slowly and deliberately taps Mac’s nose with his pointer finger and says, “Boop!” 

Mac’s brain takes a second to catch up to reality. “Did you jus’ fucking _boop _me, bro?”

Dennis’s arm collapses back onto the bed. He’s fucking _giggling_. “I jus’ mean that, like, I bet there’s _lotsa _guys out there who I could be friends with jus’ as much. The only diff’rence between them and you is that _they _didn’t sell me weed in high school an’ you _did_, an’ that’s literal-ry rit—hm.” Dennis pauses, furrows his brow, seems really confused about why that last part didn’t come out right. He bites his lip (Mac suppresses the urge to punch him) then regroups and tries again: “I jus’ mean like, you _sold _weed, an’ I _bought _weed, an’ twenty-five years later we’re here, which isn’t, like, _rare_. Y’know? Like, you’re jus’ this big, dumb…idiot…beefcake. Glamour muscles…beautiful lips…_gngrk_…” 

That’s the sound of Dennis passing out. He’s already drooling on the pillow. 

Mac touches his own lips. He knows God and Dennis both hate questions, but he would really like to ask the both of them: What the _fuck_, man? 

* * *

“Dee. Dee, wake up.”

Dee is already awake. She woke up as soon as the car slowed down to pull off of the highway, and she’s been awake for the past fifteen minutes while the Waitress drove them through winding roads. Dee had just kept her eyes shut the whole time, though, wishing they could have stayed on the highway for a bit longer so she could sleep more.

But now the car has come to a complete stop and has been turned off, and the Waitress is leaning over the center console and shaking her awake. Dee groans and cracks one eye open. She can just barely make out the silhouettes of pine trees against a cloudy dark sky. “Time is it?” Dee mumbles, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. 

“Like quarter past two.” The Waitress yawns, reclining her seat. “I’m exhausted. I’m gonna take a nap while you do whatever.” 

“Oh no you don’t!” Instantly awake, Dee grabs the cooler at her feet and drops it in the Waitress’s lap. “You gotta go put this is the heating vent that goes to room 417.”

Still reclined, Waitress looks down at the cooler. “What’s in this?”

“Snapper.”

“...snapper,” the Waitress repeats slowly. 

“You know, like the fish.”

“And what exactly am I meant to do with this fish?”

“Like I said, you’re going to put it in the heating vent. It’ll make their room smell bad.”

“What? Why? Whoseroom?”

“Not important.”

“In what world do you expect a rational person to agree to committing a crime without even knowing the reason why?”

“Rational people do shit like that all the time, babe. It’s called capitalism.”

The Waitress tentatively opens the cooler a crack and peeks inside like she thinks it might actually be full of spiders or snakes. “That’s not what capitalism is, Dee.” 

“Spoken like a true bootlicker,” Dee scoffs. 

The Waitress closes the cooler with a _snap_. “I will turn this car around and drive right back to Philly, don’t think I won’t.” 

“Ugh. Okay. Look, just do this for _me_, okay?” Dee pouts and bats her eyelashes. “For your best friend?” “You are _not _my best friend.” The Waitress shoves the cooler back into Dee’s lap.

Dee clenches her jaw. “Fine. Here’s the deal: Dennis is in that hotel and he’s trying to get laid.”

“Okay?” the Waitress says, one eyebrow raised, waiting for Dee to say more. “And?”

“Well, you’re in love with him, right? So go stop him.”

“I’m not in love with Dennis.”

“The denial thing? Really?” Dee clicks her tongue reproachfully. “Well, whatever, even if you weren’t in love with him, he’s still been an asshole to you, so why don’t you go get even and stop him, yeah?” 

The Waitress blinks, briefly shocked into silence. “_That’s _what this is about?” she says after a moment, like she can’t quite believe it. “Cockblocking your brother?”

“Well, I guess if you wanna be _crass _about it—but yeah.”

“But why?” The Waitress gasps, eyes wide with horror. “Oh my god. You’re not _in love _with Dennis, are you?”

“What the _fuck_.”

“Oh, god, I knew you guys were fucked up, but _that_—”

“Baaaahh!” Dee cries nonsensically, clamping her hands over her ears and shaking her head back and forth. “Stop it. _No_. Good lord, who do you think I am, a McPoyle?”

“Well, you’re not giving me a ton of information here! You’re _forcing_ me to speculate!”

“So you jump right to _incest_?” 

The Waitress snaps her fingers. “Oh! I know! It’s the person he’s sleeping _with_ that you’re in love with! Oh my god. Dee, are you a lesb—”

“NO! Goddamnit, I’m not a—no! Just let me talk!” Dee takes a steadying breath. “It’s Mac. Dennis and Mac might have sex.” 

“Oh,” the Waitress says, staring out the windshield as she takes in the new information. She looks at Dee. “You’re in love with _Mac_?”

“No! God, I would rather get oral surgery from a blind raccoon than—” Dee stops when she notices an impish sparkle in the Waitress’s eyes, and she swats her in the arm, hard. “Fuck you! It’s not funny!” 

The Waitress rolls her eyes. “Let me just make sure I’ve got this straight: you’re telling me that Dennis wants to bang Mac, and I’m assuming Mac wants to bang Dennis, but you…want to stop them?”

“That’s the gist of it, yeah.”

“Okay. So. It sounds kinda like it doesn’t have anything to do with you.” 

“No, it _does _have something to do with me, it has _everything _to do with me, it…” Dee cringes as she realizes she’s got no cover-up for this. Alright, well, the truth it is, then. She says in one big rush: “Okay this is going to sound so incredibly stupid but if Mac and Dennis bang then I lose my apartment.”

“Oh.” A pause. “_What_?” 

“Ugh. It’s such a long story, are you sure you—”

“I’ve got time.”

“Alright, you asked for it.” Dee shakes her head. “Okay. So last Thanksgiving, Mac and Dennis burned their apartment down—or maybe Frank did, I don’t remember—but so they’ve been living with me for the past, like, six months, and now I have this whole bet going on with Frank where he thinks he can manipulate them into banging and I think he can’t and if he wins then Mac and Dennis and I have to trade apartments with him and Charlie and, well, you’ve been to their apartment so you can see why I’m a little desperate.”

The Waitress gapes at her. 

“What?” Dee asks, annoyed. 

“You do realize that you guys make things _way_ more complicated than they need to be, right? Like, you know you don’t _have_ to live your life like that?” 

“Okay, can we tone down the judginess just a _skosh_? Because that is _not_ what I’m paying you for tonight.” 

“Can’t you just, like, go into their hotel room and sleep between them?”

“No, because I’m not supposed to interfere.”

“But you _are _interfering.”

“Yeah, of course.”

“Isn’t that cheating?”

“Yeah. So?”

“So, cheating is wrong.”

“No, cheating is only wrong if you get caught. That’s what the whole American judicial system is based on.” 

“Yeah, that’s not…accurate. Look,” the Waitress says, laying it all out. “If you lose the bet and your apartment, I’ll give you a list of the good women’s shelters in Philly, I’ve stayed in a fair few over the years. And I’ll take you to an AA meeting if you want. Beyond that, you’re on your own.”

Dee makes a whiny sound in the back of her throat. It has no effect on the Waitress. She makes the sound again; again, nothing. Dee stomps her good foot on the floor of the car and pouts. “Has anyone ever told you that you suck?”

“Yes. Many times. By you, in fact.” 

Dee groans and slams the back of her head on the seat. And then slams it a few more times. “I should’ve known better than to go to _you _for help.”

“I honestly don’t know why you came to me in the first place. You must have other friends with cars.”

“I don’t.”

“Come on. Yes you do.”

“I _really _don’t.” 

“There must be _someone_.”

Dee doesn’t say anything. 

“Wait. Are you saying you _literally_ don’t have any other friends outside of those four monsters?”

The lock on the door becomes fascinating. “Well, I’m not _not _saying it,” she mutters, half-hoping that the Waitress doesn’t hear her.

“Huh.” A pause. “It’s just, like, you’re so pretty and mean and blonde, I figured that you must know at least one other pretty, mean, blonde woman who you, like, go to brunch with and who helps you pull off scams. And you insult each other all the time and steal each other’s boyfriends and stuff.”

Jesus, is the Waitress _really _this thick? “I _do_ have someone like that,” Dee says. 

“See? I thought so. So why didn’t you ask her?”

“I did!” 

“Oh,” the Waitress frowns. “I’m confused. So she said no?”

“No, she said yes.”

“Then—but why—”

“Oh my god, she’s _you_, dumbass.”

After a good fifteen seconds of silence, the Waitress finally gets out, “But we don’t go to brunch.”

“Do you wanna go to brunch? We could go to brunch if you want. Let’s get brunch, bitch.” 

The Waitress’s eyes dart around Dee’s face. It’s unnerving. “You think I’m pretty?” she asks softly. 

Dee’s skin prickles uncomfortably. “Did I say that? I don’t think I said that.”

“I said a ‘pretty, mean, blonde friend’ and you said it was me, so…”

Dee pretends to be fascinated with the lock on the car door again. “Well, you said I was pretty first,” she mutters. “And I was just returning the compliment to be polite, so don’t let it go to your head.”

“Okay.” A small smile is audible in the Waitress’s voice and Dee hates it but she also feels something bubbly and warm and unfamiliar in the pit of her stomach. She focuses on her fingers as they fiddle with the lock, pulling it up and pushing it back down. Lately—well, for like the last five years, but at her age, five years ago counts as recent—Dee has been obsessed with studying the backs of her hands, the thinning skin, the age spots, the wrinkles and veins getting more and more prominent as the years speed by. You’re supposed to compare things you know really well to the backs of your hands, but then if you actually _look _at the backs of your hands, they're not even close to what you remember. 

“Okay, give me the fish.”

Dee slams back into the present. “Wh—huh? Why?”

The Waitress is gesturing to the cooler, a very serious expression on her face. “I’m gonna go put it in the heating vent.”

Dee sits up straighter, trying her hardest not to hope. “Really?” 

“Yeah.” The Waitress takes it upon herself to lean over the center console and grab the cooler. She looks _exhausted_—dark circles under her eyes, frizzy hair, powdered sugar still on her sweatshirt—and Dee feels a twinge of something, like she’s just as tired as the Waitress is, even though she’s not, and that almost makes her call the whole thing off, but then the Waitress grins and it’s actually softer and happier than Dee has seen her maybe ever. “Let’s block some cocks, bitch!”

* * *

Charlie is the only one working and Paddy’s is way too busy because there’s a carnival-type deal going on in the abandoned lot across the street and it has a petting zoo and the petting zoo has goats but the goats look like bears and _everyone _knows that goat-bears love beer so there are a ton of them in the bar and, again, Charlie is the _only one working_, and also the toilets in the men’s room are all overflowing so Charlie is trying to serve beers to the goat-bears and fix the toilets at the same time but it’s not going well and also he has to pee. And then he remembers that animals aren’t even _allowed _inside the bar at all because it’s a healthcode violation (Category 36), so he leaves the bathroom where the sewage is now about knee-high and tells the goat-bears that they have to leave _but _the goat-bears only speak Russian and Charlie does _not _speak Russian but the Waitress’s downstairs neighbor does so Charlie tries to call him on the rotary phone behind the bar but he can’t remember the guy’s number and the rotary thingy on the phone won’t budge and then suddenly he’s falling, hurtling to the ground at a very high speed, and he jolts awake with a snort. 

Wherever he is, it’s dark. It takes him a minute, but he puts together that he’s in the back of some sort of parked vehicle. There’s a giant, vaguely man-shaped egg, glowing in some kind of blue light. “Humpty Dumpty?” Charlie blinks sleepily at the egg, confused. “Did you kidnap me?”

“Nah, you were just sleepin’, Charlie.” Huh. Humpty Dumpty sounds an awful lot like—_oh_. 

Right, he and Frank are in the Poconos. Spying on someone, maybe. Spying on Mac and Dennis! Because of the fish factory thing. No, wait, that’s wrong, that’s over with, that wasn’t even—“What are we doing again?”

“Waitin’ for Mac and Dennis to bang it out.” Frank doesn’t look away from the laptop in front of him. He’s no stranger to Charlie waking up completely disoriented; it happens about three times a week on average. 

Charlie rubs his knuckles into his eyes. “Did I miss anything good?”

“Nah. They’re just sleepin’. I’m gettin’ worried over here, Charlie. I mean, every minute they’re asleep is a minute less they could be bangin’.” 

Charlie scoots over to Frank to look at the laptop. Sure enough, Mac and Dennis are just sleeping. They seem to have fallen asleep with the lights on. Dennis is on his side, curled up tight like a dainty baby rat, and Mac is sprawled out on his back with his arms above his head like a dead cockroach. They’re not even touching. “Yeah, but I guess unless we wanna straight-up torture them, they gotta sleep a little,” he says. “Besides, did you see how much red wine Mac drank?”

“Yeah, like three and a half bottles. So what?”

“Well, red wine makes Mac sleepy.”

“Really?” Frank snorts. “What a loser.”

“Yeah, I know, right?” Charlie yawns and stretches. “You know why red wine makes some people sleepy?”

“No, why?

“Well, you know how NyQuil is grape flavored? Red grapes are actually why—” 

“Wait wait wait!” Frank points to the laptop. “They’re movin’!”

“Oh, shit!” 

Charlie and Frank clench their fists and mutter encouragements at the screen like they’re watching a football game. Mac rolls slowly onto his side, facing Dennis’s back while they chant, “Spoon him, spoon him, spoon him—” and then, at the last second, Mac flips over onto his stomach, hugging the pillow close to his face. 

“GODDAMNIT!” Frank shouts. 

“That was _so close_!” Charlie cries.

“We gotta do something. They’ve slept enough. We can’t just sit here and let this not happen.”

Charlie nods, concentrating hard. Then he snaps his fingers. “Oh! Let’s turn up the heat!” 

“Eh? Like the heat in the room?”

“Yeah! Because then they’ll get hot and they’ll kick off the covers and they’ll take their shirts off and, like, you know, it’ll be hot, and hot is another word for sexy so it’ll work.” 

“That’s a terrible idea.”

“Aw, c’mon, dude—”

“No one ever feels sexy when it’s too hot.”

“Sure they do. You don’t call a sexy person _cold_.”

“Ooh! That gives me a better idea—we make their room _cold_.”

Charlie groans. “That’s _so_ stupid—”

“No, listen, because then they’ll have to huddle for warmth! Gets ’em feelin’ each other up.”

“But they’ll be _cold_. They’re not gonna take their clothes off if they’re cold.”

“They’re not gonna even touch each other if they’re hot!”

Charlie drags his hands down his face as he growls, his fingers pulling his lower eyelids down so the cold air hits the sensitive flesh of his eye sockets. “Come on, man, we haven’t tried a single one of my ideas yet.”

“Sure we did,” Frank says. “We used that Frankie Valli song like you said.”

“Yeah, but you came up with the whole scenario, I just thought of the song. And you’re not even _considering_ the wallet idea, so lemme just_ try_ it.” Charlie starts bouncing up and down on the floor of the van like he’s a toddler that has to pee. “Just lemme try it Frank. Lemme try it. Lemme try it. Lemme try it.”

“No,” Frank says, slicing the hair with his hand with finality. “We’re gonna freeze these motherfuckers out.”

“Ugh!” Charlie throws his hands up in the hair. “Fine. Whatever you say, _boss_.” 

Frank digs around in his backpack. “Ah! Here it is.” He pulls out a map of the hotel and hands it to Charlie. “The room is on the fourth floor. All you gotta do is press star, pound, and then one-four-seven. Then type in some kinda cold temperature, press star and pound again, then you’re done.”

Charlie feels his eyes glaze over.

“You know what?” Frank says. “This might be too much for you. 

“No, no no, I can do it, dude! I’ve got skills.” Charlie insists, grabbing the map from Franks hand. Then he reaches into his own backpack (which is a trashbag) and gets his hatchet.

“Whoa, Charlie, what are you doin’ with that?”

“You want me to go in there without protection?!” Charlie points towards the hotel with the hatchet.

“Don’t bring the hatchet, come on,” Frank says, holding out his hand. “Give it to me.”

Sighing heavily, Charlie hands Frank the hatchet, then stands up and opens the back doors of the van. “You know I hate you, right?” he asks, pausing to look back at Frank.

“Eh, you’re just sayin’ that now,” he says, already elbow-deep in the cooler to get more cold-cuts. 

Charlie shakes his head and jumps out of the van onto the pavement.

“Hey Charlie?”

“What?” Charlie snaps. 

Frank, still elbow-deep in the cooler, gives Charlie a solemn nod. “Godspeed.”

“Ugh, whatever, _dad_,” Charlie says with a dramatic eye roll, and before Frank can say anything, he slams the van doors shut. Then he pulls his other hatchet out of his puffy winter coat, gives it a smooch, and sprints towards the hotel. 

* * *

Dennis’s tongue is fuzzy and dry. He smacks it against the roof of his mouth. Tastes awful. Lights are still on. Burn through his eyelids. Bore straight into his retinae like ice picks. He groans. Loud. 

Startles with a jerk because something heavy and alive lands on his shoulder. 

“S’wrong?” Just Mac, alarmed and only half awake. Sleep-clumsy hand frantically searches over Dennis. 

“_Stop_.” Dennis draws out the vowel. Gives the whine its maximum cathartic power. Squirms away from Mac’s reach.

“Don’ worry, ’ve got a knife,” Mac mumbles into his pillow. “Safe with me.” 

“M’_fine_. Just a headache,” Dennis grumbles. 

Mac keeps moving. Bull in a goddamn china shop. Bunch of stuff, probably from Mac's bedside table, clatters and clunks onto the floor, hammers straight to the base of Dennis's skull. Mac grabs something crinkly and plastic and makes a lethargic arc in the air with his outstretched arm and he shoves a plastic water into Dennis’s face. 

Dennis tries to squirm away. “Gah, _stop_—” 

“Should drink water,” Mac slurs sleepily. 

Dennis snatches the water out of Mac’s hand. “Thanks, _doctor_.” 

“Mmphngmn. Welcome.” With nothing in between now, Mac’s hand, the one that delivered the water bottle, comes to rest on the side of Dennis’s face. Dennis shrugs him away, and Mac lets his hand be brushed off. Now it’s just barely touching the back of Dennis’s neck. Ticklish. Goosebumps spread from Dennis’s shoulders down to his thighs. Shiver. Scowl. Dennis props himself up on his elbow and tries to make the room to stop spinning through sheer force of will. Sips the water. Feels so good running down his throat that he chugs the rest. Crumples the empty bottle in his fist. Chucks it across the room. Slams the switch on the base of the lamp. Better. He crash-lands back on the pillow. 

Only when Mac starts scratching Dennis’s head does Dennis realize that Mac’s hand was still on his pillow when he crash-landed. Mac’s fingers feel—nice. Calms the ache in his head. Dennis nuzzles his head into Mac’s hand. _Keep going._

Mac’s fingers come to a stop every so often. Can’t blame him for that. Dude is half-asleep at best. Mac slowly works his way to the hair at the nape of Dennis’s neck. Weaves through the strands, up the back of Dennis's head. Massages. Room still spins but Mac’s steady scratching holds him down. 

Mac’s hand drifts down his neck. Warm. Dennis pulls the blanket up around his chin. Mac’s thumb circles along Dennis’s shoulder blade. Lazily strokes down Dennis’s upper arm, his side. Warm. Steady. There. 

And then, a realization, dreamlike in that Dennis has zero evidence to support its truth but he still has never been so sure of anything in his entire life: 

_This is the only thing that has ever mattered. _

But just how many times has he come to this exact same realization in spinning rooms just like this, in the safety of oblivion? How many times have the two of them gone through this same routine, blackout drunk and exhausted and too close, too scared to look, touching soft and slow and unsure, only in the dark, only underneath blankets, smoke and mirrors, plausible deniability; hands, heartbeats, the animals of their bodies craving nothing more than the warmth of each other, nothing more than skin against skin, and like everything that has ever existed between two people, it's beautiful and it's ugly, everything and nothing, the end of the beginning and the beginning of the end, and how many times? it's too familiar to be the first time but too terrifying to be the thousandth, but how many times? forever and never before and all at once.

Mac’s hand comes to a final stop with his wrist on Dennis’s waist, fingers hanging limp over the edge like a fallen tree hanging off the edge of a cliff. Mac is fast asleep. For all anyone can tell, Dennis is too. This is a moment made of fog: a condensation of water in the air, visible to the human eye only under certain conditions, and it will take nothing stronger than a soft breeze or a faint light to destroy it. It will be gone by the time the sun rises. Things like this are better left in the dark. 

* * *

The walkie-talkie resting on Dee’s stomach crackles to life, and the Waitress’s voice cuts through the static. “Dee, we’ve got a bit of a problem.”

Dee sits bolt upright in the backseat, where she had been lying down, trying not to freak out. “What’s wrong? Did someone see you? Are you wearing the disguise?”

“Calm down. No one saw me.”

“You’re wearing the disguise, though, right?”

The Waitress huffs impatiently. “Yes, Dee, I’m wearing the Groucho glasses. I still don’t understand _why_ I need to wear them, or why you just had a pair in your purse ready to go, but I am wearing them.”

“You need to wear them so Frank won’t be able to recognize you if he sees you on one of his security cameras,” Dee explains. “And for your information, I didn’t have just one pair ready to go, I had three pairs, and I carry them around at all times because you never know when you might need a disguise.”

“Okay, but I feel like I look even _more _suspicious in thick black glasses with a huge fake nose and giant bushy eyebrows and a mustache.”

“Suspicious is fine. Frank just can’t know you’re _you_. Can you get to the point? What’s the problem?”

“Okay, so, I found the fourth-floor HVAC room, but the vent in here is pretty small. I can’t fit.” 

“Is that all?” Dee scoffs. “Sure you can. Haven’t you seen _Die Hard_?” 

“Uh, no?”

“No?! Seriously?”

“Seriously.” 

“Well, what about _Die Hard 2_?”

“No.”

“_Die Hard with a Vengeance_?” 

“I’ll just shorten this conversation by saying that I haven’t seen a single movie in the _Die Hard _franchise.”

“There are only two more, it wouldn’t take that long to finish the list.”

“Dee.”

“_Live Free or Die Hard_—”

“_Dee_.”

“And _A Good Day to Die Hard_.”

“Dee! Focus!”

“That’s all of them! I’m done! That didn’t take so long, did it?” Dee says, but she’s thinking she might need a new tactic here. _Die Hard _references can always convince the guys to do stuff, but maybe women are immune to them, and Dee just never realized it because she only hangs out with men. She thinks fast and tries something else: “Okay, well, listen, I’m gonna hit you with some science right now so hold on to your tits: humans always underestimate the size of openings. It’s like a defense mechanism, so we don’t get stuck, but people can actually fit into some pretty tight spaces if they try.”

A pause. “Is that true?” The Waitress sounds uncertain, which is better than dismissing it outright.

“Of course it’s true!” And for all Dee knows, it might be. She’s never actually _heard_ it, but it does make a certain kind of sense, and the Waitress is just overreacting anyway. Everyone knows people can crawl around in vents. It’s in a ton of movies. And if Bruce goddamn Willis can fit in vents, then the Waitress _definitely_ can; she’s tiny. “Why would I lie to you right now? I have just as much stake in this as you do. More, in fact. _Much_ more. Trust me: you’re not gonna get stuck.”

A pause, then: “Fine. I’ll give it a shot.”

Dee smiles, satisfied. “Good girl.” She sets the walkie-talkie down on her thigh and refocuses on the gossip mag that she brought with her. Apparently some D-list talkshow bitch insulted Zendaya’s hair recently. “Someone’s gonna get fired,” Dee sing-songs to herself. At least that’s something to look forward to. She turns the page, where there’s a spread about which celebrities see The Dress as blue and black and which see it as white and gold. Dee has to admit that in the orange-soda light of the parking lot lamps, she can _sort of _see how it _might _come across as white and gold. She’s not about to admit that to Charlie, though. 

The walkie-talkie beeps. “Uh, Dee?”

“Yeah?”

A pause, then: “I’m stuck.”

* * *

Wearing one of her emergency pairs of Groucho glasses (set number two of three) and a dirty towel from the truck of the Waitress’s car wrapped around her head like a babushka, Dee rides up the elevator (the camera is gone, thank gone) and hobbles down the hallway to a door marked “EMPLOYEES ONLY.” It’s not locked, but the room is completely dark. “Hello?” she calls tentatively. 

“Finally,” comes the Waitress’s voice from the dark. 

“Why the hell didn’t you turn the lights on?”

“They’re automatic. They shut off like two minutes ago.”

Dee limps further into the room, shutting the door behind her. Sure enough, the fluorescents click on, revealing the Waitress, also wearing Groucho glasses (set number one of three), sitting on the floor, her right arm shoulder-deep in a _very _small vent. 

Dee snorts in delighted surprise. “You tried to fit in _that_? Girl, that is waaay too small.”

“You _told _me I could fit!” the Waitress yells, rage-kicking fruitlessly at Dee from the ground. 

“Shh!” Dee laughs while she shushes her. “You didn’t tell me the vent was _that _small. That’s only like 9 inches wide!” 

“Yeah, I know, okay?” the Waitress huffs, exasperated, her cheeks pinking with embarrassment. 

“Wow.” Dee cocks her head, starting to see the Waitress in a whole new light. “You’re kind of stupid, aren’t you?” 

The Waitress hangs her head in resignation. Dee grins. The Waitress has always acted like she’s _so _superior to Dee and the gang, and for some reason, Dee had believed it. Why didn’t she realize that women can be dumbasses too? See, _this _is why America needs feminism, she thinks to herself. 

Dee props her crutches against a nearby shelf, and with her good hand against the wall to steady herself, she lowers herself carefully to the ground near the Waitress. “So what exactly are you stuck on?” she asks. 

“My bracelet is, like, caught on something, I don’t know—”

Dee peers down the vent. “Can’t see shit,” she concludes. “Guess I’m gonna have to go in too.” 

Dee reaches her not-sprained arm down the vent, and the Waitress is mutters to herself: “Saturday night, stuck in a vent, and the only person to rescue me is Dee goddamn Reynolds in Groucho glasses? Jesus, I gotta get my life together.” 

“Hey!” Dee feels her way up the Waitress’s arm to her bracelet. “Don’t be like that! I’ve got long arms _and _my shoulders are double-jointed, so even though one of them is out of commission, you’re still very lucky that I’m the one here to rescue you. Plus, it’s technically Sunday morning. And you’re wearing Groucho glasses too, bitch.”

“What happened to being nice to me?”

“Yeah, well, that was before you tried to climb into a goddamn shoebox and compromised the integrity of the mission.” Dee figures out why the bracelet is stuck: the end of the chain is somehow wedged between two slats of metal. Dee gives it a yank, but it doesn’t move. She yanks harder.

“Ow!” 

“Oh, shut up,” Dee sneers. “Why don’t you just take the bracelet off?” 

“Don’t you think I would have done that already if I could? I can’t undo the clasp.”

“What kind of clasp is it?”

“It’s one of the ones that looks like a lobster claw.” 

“Oh come on, those are the hardest ones! You need two hands to do those!”

“Oh, well, _excuse me_ for not considering what kind of jewelry to wear for crawling around in a goddamn _vent_!”

“You could’ve taken it off before just diving right in. How do you even put it on by yourself?”

“I never take it off. I’ve worn it for like five years.”

“Fuck. Okay. What if you stick your other arm in and we undo the clasp together?” 

The Waitress nods. “Fine.”

After about a minute of awkward shuffling, the Waitress has both of her arms down the vent, one arm reaching over each of Dee’s shoulders sort of like the way a socially awkward middle-schooler would slow-dance, if the socially awkward middle-schooler was also a robot. Oh, and the Waitress is also straddling Dee and sitting on her lap. Dee tries not to think about what it would look like if someone walked in on them right now. 

“Okay, I think we’re almost in position,” Dee says. “Now just find my hand with yours and—”

The lights click off.

“Oh goddamnit!” Dee cries. “Are you kidding me?!”

“Shh! Let’s just keep going, I think we’ve almost got it.” 

They resume their search for the clasp silently, feeling around. Dee focuses on the sound of the Waitress panting; her chest rises and touches Dee’s every time she inhales. The Waitress smells like drugstore-brand antiperspirant and sugar-free bubble gum and sweat. Their fingers find each other. The Waitress pauses for half a second, her breath hitching.

The lights flick on. 

Dee and the Waitress look at each other through the Groucho glasses, wide-eyed with alarm. 

Only Dee can see Charlie coming down the stairs; the Waitress is facing the other direction. Dee has very deliberately _not _told the Waitress that Charlie is involved with this. Shit shit shit. This is gonna crash and burn. There’s no way Charlie isn’t gonna see them.

But, by some kind of miracle sent from heaven (or, more likely, because of Charlie’s enigmatically selective observational skills), Charlie _doesn’t _see them. He makes his way to some kind of panel on the wall with a bunch of buttons and a little screen. He’s muttering to himself in a mocking tone of voice: “‘Ooh, turn the cold up, Charlie! ‘Listen to me, Charlie!’ ‘I’m Frank! I’m the boss! I know _everything_!’ Stupid piece of shit doesn’t know shit about shit…” 

Well, Charlie not talking _and _not seeing them was probably way too much to hope for. The Waitress’s eyes flash with recognition and then anger. She’s clearly about to say something without thinking and Dee really, _really _needs her to be quiet but she doesn’t have any free appendages to slap over the Waitress’s mouth so Dee uses the only available option: her own lips. 

It’s not a kiss, exactly—or maybe it is in the most technical sense of the word, but it’s not very pleasant, just faceholes mashed together in rage and desperation. It only lasts for two or three seconds and then the Waitress pulls back. 

It shuts her up, so that’s a plus, but now the Waitress is, like, _looking _at Dee through the fake glasses with a mixture of disgust and confusion and curiosity that can’t be hidden by the mustache or the bushy eyebrows, and then it hits Dee that it’s the exact same expression that was on Mac’s and Dennis’s faces when she first told them about the bet. 

Uh-oh. 

Then there’s a loud crashing sound, and their attention snaps back into place. Over the Waitress’s shoulder, she sees that Charlie is hacking away at the panel with his goddamn hatchet.

“Yeah, take that, Frank!” Charlie snarls. He rears back and then gives one more good chop, and this time, the panel gives off a significant amount of electrical sparks. Charlie yelps and jumps backwards, and the hatchet clatters to the ground. Charlie looks around the room wildly like he’s making sure no one saw that, and then he sprints away and stumbles out the door.

The door slams shut behind him and the Waitress explodes. “Holy shit, Dee, _Charlie _is here?!” 

“Oh, don’t start on that,” Dee whines. 

“Why didn’t you tell me?!”

“If I told you, would you have agreed to help me? No! So now please let’s just get you unstuck and get the fuck out of here, okay?” 

“But what about the fish?!” 

“Fuck the fish! I have no idea what Charlie just did, but whatever it was, I know that he’s screwing shit up for Mac and Dennis better than I ever could. Now, hang on, okay? This might hurt.”

“Wait no no no hang on! What might h—_FUCK_!”

Dee yanks as hard as she can on the Waitress’s arm; the bracelet comes free and in tact. They remove themselves from the vent and the Waitress scrambles up, grabbing the cooler. She extends a hand to Dee to help her up but then the door opens again. The Waitress dives behind a shelf of cleaning supplies, leaving Dee fully exposed and stuck on the ground in front of the vent.

Charlie comes hurtling into the room again, arms over his head like he’s shielding himself, shouting, “Don’t worry, hatchet baby! I’m comin’ for ya!” Once he reaches the bottom of the stairs, though, he looks up and skids to a stop, confused. “Huh. Kinda thought this whole place would be on fire,” he mutters to himself. He shrugs, and then bends down to pick up the hatchet he dropped earlier. 

He starts back towards the door, but just as he’s about the leave, one of Dee’s crutches falls onto the ground with a loud clang. Charlie whirls around with a feral scream, the hatchet raised above his head; Dee screams and throws her arms in front of her face, and then— 

Charlie’s knees buckle and he crumples to the ground.

And there’s the Waitress, standing behind him, stunned, in her hand nothing other than the still-frozen-solid snapper.

“Holy shit holy shit holy _shit_.” The Waitress stares in shock at the lump of Charlie’s body on the ground at her feet. “Oh my god, did I kill him? Dee, did I kill him?!” 

“Don’t worry, Charlie can’t be killed, he just gets concussions, like, super easily,” Dee explains, clambering to her feet as quickly as she can, steadying herself against the wall. “So, like, good call on that move, actually.” 

“Oh my god oh my god oh my god—”

“Jesus, calm down! Charlie’s gonna be fine. We really don’t have time for you to freak out right now.”

On the floor, Charlie twitches and the Waitress shrieks, practically leaping backwards the way she might if a mouse just ran across the floor. “Who’s a person?” Charlie mumbles. “Oprah’s here?”

“Ah, shit, he’s waking up,” Dee says. “Let’s _go_.”

“Why’s Oprah with a mustache?” Charlie slurs, shutting his eyes again. Dee and the Waitress wait for a few seconds to see if he’ll move again. 

When she’s pretty sure he’s out cold, Dee grabs one of her crutches and starts for the door. The Waitress, though, is just standing there, and she still has the snapper in her hands, holding it as far away from herself as she can. “I have to get rid of the murder weapon!”

“You didn’t _murder_ him! He’s still breathing!” 

“We need to destroy the evidence!” 

“Just leave it, oh my god!”

“Just give me a second!” After spinning around in a panic, the Waitress darts over to the vent and chucks the fish into it. She looks back at Dee, pleading with her eyes. “Now no one will ever know it was us, right?!” 

“Yeah, sure. Great job, Nixon.” Dee opens the door. “Now let’s get the _fuck _of here.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks hope you liked it!


	8. “A Monster Named Desire”

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dee and the Waitress escape! And then they go to hotel jail, because of course. Meanwhile, Dennis turns into a fragile, whiny baby in the heat, but Mac is more than willing to put up with his shit—especially after Dennis drunkenly told Mac that their relationship wasn’t special just a few hours earlier.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Holy shit you guys I’m so sorry. I had friends in town and then I got the flu and then I had a huge work project and then it was Thanksgiving. Anyway, this chapter got so long that I have split it into two parts. The next one will be up in a few days, although I know you have no reason to trust me on that :)
> 
> Anyway, at the beginning of Each chapter, there’s a summary of the previous chapter, so if you don’t want to reread the whole thing, you can just read those!

_Previously, on The Gang Miscalculates the Odds”..._

Dee and the Waitress sneak inside the hotel to put a frozen fish factory snapper in the heating vent. Before they can do that, though, they run into Charlie, who only sees them after he straight up destroys the heating system (against Frank’s wishes). Not to worry, though; the Waitress knocks him out cold with the still-frozen fish. Meanwhile, Dennis returns to his and Mac’s hotel room. He’s gotten blackout drunk and he tells Mac that their friendship isn’t anything special. (Earlier in the evening, Dennis tried to hit on a cute colorblind bartender in the hotel restaurant, but it turned out that she saw his proposal to Mac. She chastised Dennis, telling him that he was incredibly lucky to have found someone who loves him and who he loves back.)

* * *

They come stumbling out the door of the HVAC room, Dee limping alongside the Waitress, using her as a crutch. Adrenaline bites at the back of Dee’s neck and she wishes she could cut off her fucking foot and grow a new one like a lizard. “Go faster!” she hisses.

“I’m going as fast as I can!”

“Well, try harder!” 

“_You’re_ the one with the broken foot.”

“Oh, so this is _my _fault now?”

“Yeah, kind of!”

“You’re the one that knocked Charlie out with a frozen—HEY—don’t let go of me, bitch! I can’t walk!” 

The Waitress ignores her, extricates herself from Dee and bends over a bit, facing the other direction. She jerks her head back, gesturing like she wants Dee to— 

“No no no no no. You are _not _giving me a goddamn piggyback, are you insane?!”

“It’ll be faster.”

“You’re like five feet tall!” 

“I’m strong!”

“Not _that _strong.”

“Well, I do yoga!” 

“Oh, what, so you can touch your toes and suddenly that makes you some kind of lady beefcake?” 

“Yoga’s good for your core.” 

“Bullshit! Yoga doesn’t even count as exercise, it’s just an hour for dumb hot skinny bitches to show other dumb hot skinny bitches how much better they look in Lululemon and—” 

“Shut up!” The Waitress stands up straight and cuts her off with a sharp gesture. “Shut up about Lululemon! There are more important things to worry about right now than Lululemon!” Then her voice softens, just a touch, but it’s still rough and determined: “Just _trust _me.” 

Dee is about to protest that she has never trusted anyone in her entire life and she does _not_ intend to start now, but the manic glitter in the Waitress’s eyes stops her, and she thinks, Fuck it. Might as well. 

“Alright, but it’s your funeral.” She hops up onto the Waitress’s back, and—much to Dee’s simultaneous surprise, relief, and chagrin—the Waitress catches her and remains standing solidly on her two feet. 

The Waitress trudges towards the elevator at the other end of the hall, her pace dragging a bit due to Dee’s weight but okay, _fine_, it’s faster than before. They’re almost there when the elevator announces its impending arrival with a cheery ding! 

“Shit!” Dee curses as the Waitress skids to a stop and whirls around in the opposite direction. 

There’s no time to think anymore. With her good foot, Dee gestures at a nearby door that isn’t labeled with a room number. The Waitress lumbers over to it; Dee reaches down, turns the knob and it’s locked, so she musters all her strength, harnesses all the adrenaline in her system, and fucking karate chops it. The Waitress jumps back in surprise, but the wood around the knob splinters, Dee snaps it off fully, and they cram themselves inside what turns out to be a narrow utility closet. 

Dee pulls the door shut behind them, leaving them in almost total darkness, the only light being what little shines through the jagged hole where the knob used to be. 

Carefully, the Waitress sets Dee on the ground and Dee hunches on instinct, some kind of animal knowledge that the less space she takes up, the less chance they have of being caught. They freeze that way, practically cheek to cheek, holding their breath. 

A single set of quick and confident footsteps passes by the closet door, the shadow of a person passes over the hole in the door and then fear trickles down from Dee’s scalp like someone cracked an egg over it. But the footsteps fade away, making their way further down the hall until they can’t hear them anymore on the carpeted floor.

A tense silence stretches out, finally broken by the Waitress, who whispers, “Do you think she’s gone?” 

A few more seconds pass as Dee listens hard for any more sounds of human activity. “I think so.” 

Dee literally feels the tension leave the Waitress’s body. How could she not, standing there with her front pressed up against the Waitress’s back? And Dee herself is dizzy with relief, almost drunk off of it. Jesus Christ. She feels like she just outran Death itself. 

It’s sort of like how a chainsaw starts up, the way the two of them start to laugh: a few small, abortive peals, some kind of chemical reaction to avoiding certain death (or whatever), until something clicks and they’re struck down with a full-blown case of the giggles. And, it always is with the giggles, the more they try to stifle them, the more impossible they are to stop. They’re shaking hard with the effort of keeping quiet; the Waitress has to clap a palm over her mouth to stop herself from making noise, but her shoulders shudder harder, which only makes Dee laugh harder. Because that’s the other thing about the giggles: they’re very contagious.

It’s not even that the situation is _funny_, exactly, but it’s just so absurd: Dee is standing behind a profoundly forgettable girl from her high school, wearing a sweatshirt covered in powdered sugar from stuffing her face with the trash donuts she found on the floor of her shitty car. And this girl just knocked Charlie out cold with a fucking frozen fish, which Dee stole from the fish factory that she managed to shut down single-handedly not two days ago. 

“Stop—” Dee wheezes. “Oh my god, _stop_, I can’t fucking breathe.”

The Waitress twists her head around to say something, but Dee is again seized with laughter before she gets anything out, because: “Oh my god, you’re still wearing the glasses?”

“So are you!” The Waitress maneuvers around in the tight space of the closet to fully face Dee. And then something changes.

And then neither of them are laughing anymore. 

And then it’s the summer before seventh grade and everything is happening at once. Sixth grade ends; Dee shoots up three inches over the summer and towers over everyone else her class; Dee has to get a metal back brace to correct her weird spine; Dee turns twelve; Dee starts seventh grade; Dee finds herself wanting attention, approval, applause; Dee finds herself wanting _everything_, and she hates herself for it. 

Everyone knows that a woman who _wants _things is an attention whore or a slut or a frigid bitch or, or, or…the labels for a girls who wants things are endless, it just depends on _what _any given girl wants, and but so it’s not the _what _that matters, in the end, is it? It’s the wanting _itself _that turns a woman into a monster. And anyway, everyone knows that girls who are truly good don’t _want _anything at all. Those girls just _deserve _love; people will give it to them without prompting. And even at age twelve, Dee has learned that she is not and will never be one of those girls. 

So. She gets to work. She tries desperately to build a cage strong enough to contain the monster of her desire, to hide it while she attempts to tame it. Keeps an eye on it as time passes until she doesn’t have to pay very close attention to it anymore, and then one day, starved and abused into submission but not yet fully tamed, the monster escapes. 

Ravenous and afraid, the monster searchs for safer environments to live in, places where its camouflage is more effective, where it can devour its prey in secret, where no one can see how fucking _hungry _it is: school plays, dance classes, gossip, beauty pageants, seeing how far boys will bend over backwards just for a shot at kissing her, drinking too much at parties to make people laugh—anything that might cause someone to look at her and say: “You—you’re _good_.” 

Skip ahead a few years, and Dee is sitting at her desk in the back row of her freshman-year math class. Pre-algebra. Exponential curves drawn on the chalkboard and redrawn in Dee’s tattered notebook, the one with the spiral binding that’s coming undone and constantly catches at her sweaters. 

Dee loves this class. Math is consistent. Math doesn’t change. Math has rules. Math is actually kind of...beautiful? 

But math is for nerds, so Dee does her algebra homework in secret, after her parents and Dennis have gone to bed. And she never turns it in. 

Math class isn’t a place where the monster can live. Getting a high-enough grade in math means being asked to join Mathletes, and that isn’t the kind of attention the monster wants. Instead, Dee turns in the work that Rickety Cricket does for her, because he’s only okay at math and can be trusted to do it just well enough for Dee to pass without raising any eyebrows. As a bonus, the monster feeds on the fact that Cricket, altar boy/hall monitor/student body treasurer, is so in love with her that he is willing to sacrifice his morals to help her cheat. 

The equations themselves, though, the graphs and theories and terms, they’re still burned into her memory twenty-five years later. _Asymptote_: a line that continuously approaches a curve but never touches it. 

There’s a cold comfort in the idea that it doesn’t even matter how much you want something, because while you can get infinitely close, you’re never going to get it. A cold comfort, but a comfort nonetheless. It’s okay to want something, as long as you know it’s impossible. 

Dee’s lips hover so close to the Waitress’s that she can feel the warmth radiating off of her. 

But math is never wrong. 

The present punches Dee square in the face when the closet door swings open. She and the Waitress spring apart as far as they possibly can in a closet that narrow, squinting hard at the bright light flooding their eyes. A big, tough-looking woman with a tight ponytail and a crisply ironed hotel staff uniform stands there, giving off the general vibe of a parking citation. 

The woman takes a moment to process the picture in front of her, scanning them up and down, then takes a step back and crosses her arms, grinning like a cat does at its prey, immensely satisfied by the mere prospect of the kill. “Well, well, well, what have we here?”

* * *

“Unhand me at once!” Dee tries to yank her upper arm out of the Human Parking Ticket’s strong grip. She and the Waitress have been dragged into the elevator, going down to the first floor. “This is _abuse_! I can’t _walk _and now you’re dragging me all around this hotel?! I could sue!”

“Mm, shoulda thought of that before you trespassed,” the Human Parking Ticket clucks. She sounds way too happy to be doing this. 

“Thought of what?!” Dee cries. “That I was going to be manhandled by some mountain of woman and dragged through this supposedly four-star hotel?”

“We have five stars, thank you very much.” 

“That’s not what Yelp says.”

“Okay, Yelp is not an official source of hotel ratings!” (A sore spot, clearly.) 

“Please don’t listen to my friend, she’s got anger issues,” the Waitress begs.

Dee yells, “I swear to god, if you say I have anger issues ONE MORE TIME, I’m selling your organs on the black market.” 

“You don’t want to sell them on the black market,” the Human Parking Ticket says with an efficient shake of her head. “You’d be surprised at how little it pays.”

“Oh, don’t worry, I wouldn’t be doing it for the money,” Dee assures her threateningly. 

“Can we maybe stop talking about selling my organs?” The Waitress addresses the Human Parking Ticket and says, trying her best to sound polite and cooperative, “We really don’t want any trouble. Just let us go and we’ll get out of your hair.” 

“No can do!” the woman chirps. “Not before I call the police, anyway.”

“Call the police?!” Dee cries as they arrive on the first floor. The woman drags them through the lobby, and Dee trips over her own feet trying to keep up. “Slow down! Can’t you see I am _injured_? Why are you calling the _police_?” 

“Because my manager doesn’t believe me when I tell him that we get trespassers here, which forces _me _to file a police report every single time it happens.” (Yet another sore spot, it seems.) “If I do that enough times, the cops will tell my manager and he will _finally _be forced to amp up security like I’ve been trying to get him to do for the past five years. Now, just sit tight in here until the police arrive, mkay?” She has brought them behind the reception desk. She kicks open a door that Dee didn’t even notice was there and tosses them inside an empty, windowless room.

“Oh goddamnit, what the hell is this, _hotel_ _jail_?” Dee cries. 

“Yep! Made it myself. Fun fact, it used to be the breakroom, but no one wanted to use it after Gary died in there. Have fun suffering the consequences of your actions!” The woman slams the door. 

“Wait—who’s Gary?!” Dee bangs on the door with her fist, over and over. The _last_ thing she needs tonight is to be haunted. “Who the fuck is Gary? Is he a ghost now?! HEY! Get back here!” 

The lock clicks. It sounds like a gunshot. Dee goes still and silent. 

After a long moment, the Waitress says, “Well—” 

Dee rests her forehead on the smooth wood of the door. “Stop.”

“But I didn’t—” 

“Stop. Talking.” 

By the grace of god, the Waitress listens. Dee doesn’t move, can’t move, suddenly too exhausted to even try to sit, which would be a whole thing because of her multiple injuries.

She’s fucking pissed off. She’s also relieved. It’s for the best that she didn’t actually kiss the Waitress. The heat of the moment and the rush she got from the escape had fucked up decision-making skills. The way it actually turned out is easy to dismiss. After all, their lips never touched. For all Dee knows, the Waitress was completely unaware that a kiss was on the table. And even if she _was_, then Dee can be the one to play dumb instead. Simple. 

“Do you think we’re going to get arrested?” the Waitress asks eventually. 

“We didn’t do anything wrong,” Dee says to the door.

“Are you sure? Because that woman _did _say we were trespassing…” 

“Oh, well yeah, I mean, we were definitely trespassing.” 

“We _were_?” 

“Yeah, but calm down, we’re not gonna get arrested for _trespassing_.” 

“How do you _know_?” 

“Because that woman is a bitch with a stick up her ass who desperately needs to get laid,” Dee explains, feeling street smart and damn proud of it. With some effort, she turns around so her back is against the door and finds that the Waitress is squatting on the floor across the room. (She really _is_ flexible.) “And she told us she calls the police all the time about stupid stuff like this, so they definitely hate her. Also, arresting people is a fuck-ton of paperwork, even more than just filing a report, and not to stereotype but cops are generally the laziest pieces of shit in the world. Ten bucks says they pop in, take one look at us, see we’re just two totally harmless hot white blondes girls, take a quick note, and then go back to eating donuts or running red lights or racial profiling or whatever it is that cops do. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

The Waitress offers a tentative smile. “Why do I get the feeling you know this from experience?”

Dee smirks, looks at the floor. “Guilty.” 

“So, do you realize that you’ve called me hot twice now?”

Dee snaps her head up. “What?!”

“Well, indirectly, ut still.”

“No I didn’t.”

“Yeah, you did, I told you I do yoga and you said yoga is for dumb hot bitches—”

“Okay, hang on—”

“And then you said the police would see that we’re two, quote, harmless hot blondes.” 

A muscle twitches in Dee’s jaw. “Shut up.” 

“Okay,” the Waitress agrees, but the way the word trails off at the end, the way she shrugs, the smirk on her face, suggests that she thinks she’s got Dee all figured out. 

Well, Dee thinks. That’s not good. 

* * *

Dennis is dying. 

His head is pounding and swimming with deep-sea fish. He’s nauseous. There’s a brutal ache deep in the marrow of his bones. And he has a fever. So the only logical conclusion is that he’s dying. 

It’s four in the morning. He has no idea what time it actually is but it’s definitely four in the morning, because four in the morning is when the world becomes grotesque, and there’s something very grotesque about this moment, although that could just be the fever talking but no, it’s the fever _combined _with the fact that it’s grotesque o’clock in the morning that’s making everything even _more_ terrible. 

Adding to the terribleness is the sickening sensation, churning right underneath his sternum, that he’s forgotten something, and that it’s going to hit him like a goddamn truck if he remembers whatever it is. 

Dennis doesn’t even remember _where _he is, though. He’d like to try, but he’s afraid of what he’ll discover if he so much as scratches the surface. And that’s the worst part of the aftermath. Your psychological wounds have a chance to scab over while you’re asleep, but you eventually have to wake up and rip them open again and _Do you know how rare that is?_

The sentence comes out of nowhere and then Dennis implodes, collapses in on himself. He’s just an empty can of PBR and the sentence was a shitfaced frat boy smashing him against his forehead annd now Dennis remembers: he’s in a hotel. He’s sleeping a twin bed with Mac. He 

Terrified that more shitfaced frat boy sentences are going to start kicking him around like a white trash football, Dennis starts counting backwards from a hundred by sevens as fast as he can: 93. 86. 79. 72…72 something’s off. The twin bed isn’t as uncomfortable as it should be with two grown men sleeping in it so 72, 65 Dennis feels around blindly in the space next to him and there’s nothing there 58, 51 oh, okay: Mac is gone. 

Wait.

Oh god. 

Mac is gone. 

Dennis swallows hard against the abrupt wave of nausea that hits him. Mac left. Mac left, and worse than that, Dennis can’t remember anything that happened after he left the bar with that bottle of tequila, and everything before that is patchy, the blackout bleeding back further into the day, so he doesn’t even know how long Mac has been gone. Something must have happened between them to make Mac leave, but 44 37 30 you were drinking to forget and apparently you’ve forgotten so don’t fuck it up by trying to remem(23 16 9)but Mac is _gone _and Dennis must be missing a major clue as to why, so if he just(16 16 16)fuck his fever is so high that he can barely(16 9 2)the truck hits him. 

He spins out on the ice, the thoughts coming fast and all at once the way they do when you’re in a car crash and there’s nothing you can do to save yourself except steer into the skid: Dennis kissed Mac, now Mac hates him, now Mac is gone, because Mac either doesn’t want to be around a disgusting homo or he’s terrified of _being _a disgusting homo but it doesn’t really matter which one is true does it? because both options are fucking catastrophes and in reality Dennis knows that it’s a mixture of both. 

He breaks out into a sweat, the car keeps spinning, what if Mac _was _in the hotel room when Dennis got back? what if it wasn’t the kiss? what if Dennis did something else, something he doesn’t remember? what if he told Mac he hated him? what if he kicked Mac out? what if (god forbid) he— 

The bathroom door creaks open. Feet pad softly on the carpet, walking all the way to the window on the other side of the room. 

Without opening his eyes, Dennis croaks, “Mac?” 

“Ah, shit, sorry dude. I didn’t mean to wake you up.” 

So he didn’t leave. 

Dennis squints one eye open to find Mac standing by the window with the curtains open. The room is dark, but orange and blue light from the lights in the parking lot color his face and chest. Bare chest. Dennis’s stomach lurches at the sight. In the end, the panic hadn’t really been about Mac leaving, had it? No. It had been about what might have happened if Mac stayed. 

Which, it turns out, he did. So… 

“Mac,” Dennis whispers, closes his eyes against the feverish image at the foot of the bed, struggles to swallow against his dry mouth. “I’m dying.” 

Mac’s voice is tinged with irritation, but it’s fond and familiar. “You’re not dying, Dennis. You’re hungover.”

“I have a fever.”

“No you don’t, it’s just really hot in here.”

“I have a _fever_,” Dennis repeats emphatically, and even though it’s the logical next step, he still jumps a little when he feels the back of Mac’s hand on his forehead. 

“Relax, I’m taking your temperature,” Mac mutters. 

Dennis opens his eyes; concerned concentration lines Mac’s expression. His hand is warm. Hot, even. “Do you have a fever too? Is that why you’re not wearing a shirt?”

“You’re not wearing a shirt either,” Mac points out. 

Dennis looks down at his chest, and sure enough: no shirt. When did that happen? _Why _did that happen? He yanks the covers up to his chin and pulls away from Mac, watching his face for clues. 

“But no, I don’t have a fever,” Mac says. “And neither do you. I told you, it’s just super hot in here. I think maybe the A/C is—” 

“What happened to my shirt?”

“Huh?”

“What happened to my shirt!”

Mac looks bewildered. “I don’t know, you probably took it off in your sleep or something. Because, like I’ve been saying, it’s really hot in here.” 

Oh. “And—yours?”

“Uh, I took it off when I got up to piss?” Mac speaks slowly like Dennis is very stupid. “Because it’s really hot in here?”

Dennis waits, searches Mac’s face for a tell, but he _seems _like he’s being honest… 

No, Dennis decides: he _is_ being honest. 

Oh thank _god_. 

“Maybe Frank and Charlie poisoned us,” Dennis suggests.

“Nah, they wouldn’t do that to us.” 

Dennis pushes himself up onto his elbows, arches an eyebrow. “Wouldn’t they, though?” 

“No!” But then Mac considers it. “Well...” 

In spite of the prospect of being poisoned, Dennis feels practically weightless. All he has to worry about now is physical pain, which is so much more preferable than the other kind. The relief energizes him enough that he really leans into the melodrama of illness, collapses back on the pillow, throws an arm across his face to block out the light and the misery of the world. “Goddamn it, how old are we that we can’t tell if we’re hungover or if we’ve been goddamn poisoned?” he laments. “I hate being almost forty, Mac, I _hate _it!” 

“_Almost_ forty? You _are _forty.” 

“_You’re _forty!” Dennis spits. 

“Not until April,” Mac reminds him, and then his face lights up: “Oh! Maybe we have ebola!”

_This _oughta be good. “_Ebola_?” 

“Yeah! See, you flung your arm over your face like that and you looked like one of those women in those boring British movies who wear complicated dresses, and they faint all the time because they have, like, smallpox or ebola or something. And then I was like, oh! Maybe we have ebola.” 

“How the hell would we get ebola all the way in Pennsylvania? Isn’t it an African thing?”

“Yeah, but bacterias are crafty,” Mac says with a casual shrug.

“Ebola is a _virus_, Mac.” 

“I know, that’s what I said.”

“No, you just said it was a bacteria.”

“Okay, fine, if you wanna get all sciencey about it, it’s _technically_ a bacterial virus.”

“That’s not a thing.” (_Is_ that a thing?)

“It is! Seriously! Look,” Mac widens his stance the way he does when he thinks he’s about to school someone on something, hands up and at the ready to supply his trademark emphatic gestures. “There are bacterias, and then there are viruses, and then there are bacterial viruses. And that’s why ebola is so bad. Because it’s both.”

Dennis opens his mouth to protest, but now that he’s thinking about it…“Is that true?”

“Yeah! I heard it on the radio. And not Ryan Seacrest Top-40 radio, either. This was like NPR shit.” 

“NPR shit, huh?” 

“Uh-huh!” Mac beams. “See, that’s why you gotta keep me around, Dennis. Just try and find another guy who knows about shit like this. I’m definitely like, one in a million.”

Dennis frowns. That kind of came out of nowhere, but whatever. “Wouldn’t anyone who listened to that segment of NPR know about shit like this?”

Mac’s face falls. “Well—” 

“So what are the symptoms of ebola?”

“Oh, you get all sick and you throw up a bunch of blood and then all your intestines sort of just slip right out of your butt.”

Of _course_. Dennis rolls his eyes so hard it hurts.

“It’s true, dude!” Mac insists.

Jesus Christ, Mac is such a goddamn idiot. Dennis is so glad he didn’t leave. “Sure it is. Hey, let me ask you something real quick: have you thrown up any blood recently, Mac?”

“Well—no, not—”

“Then I’m going to go ahead and venture a guess that we don’t have _goddamn ebola_!” Dennis shouts the last few words and immediately winces at the sudden headache that spikes. Shit, he really is dying. 

“Well, if it’s not ebola, then I guess it’s just really hot in here and you have a hangover.”

“If _this _is a hangover, then it’s the worst hangover I’ve ever had in my _life_.” 

“Okay, but to be fair, you say that every time you have a hangover.”

Dennis rolls onto his stomach, buries his face in the pillow, and groans. 

When Mac doesn’t say anything, Dennis groans again, louder and more insistent.

“Oh my god, fine!” Mac relents. “I’ll go get you some goddamn Advil from reception or some shit. Will that get you to stop sounding like an angry cow?”

“I don’t sound like an angry cow!” Dennis cranes his neck down and sees that Mac is—oh, goddamnit. Dennis sits up fast. “Don’t wear my shoes, asshole!” 

“Chill out, bitch. I’m doing this for _you_. My boots take too long to put on.”

“Then buy another fucking pair of shoes!”

“_You _buy another fucking pair of shoes.”

“Well, I’m gonna need to if you have foot warts right now!” 

Mac doesn’t acknowledge him, just strides towards the door.

“Mac!” Dennis calls from the bed. “Mac! You don’t have foot warts, do you?” You _know _those are a bitch to get rid of!” 

The door slams shut. _Bastard_. 

Not two seconds later, before Dennis even has a chance to lie back down, Mac returns. The topics of shoes and foot warts have been totally forgotten; instead, he looks smug as hell. He crosses his arms and leans on the wall, a triumphant smirk on his lips. 

“What?” Dennis snaps. 

“Guess what?”

“Obviously I don’t know. What?” 

“It’s cooler in the hallway.”

“Oh. Well. That’s good.” Dennis follows Mac with his eyes as he goes to check the thermostat on the wall. 

“But you know this means you’re just hungover, right? And you’re just being a little bitch about it?”

“Suck my dick,” Dennis bites back. 

“Someone’s gotta call you on your shit,” Mac shrugs. “I call you on your shit, I take care of you…I’m tellin’ you, man, one in a million right here.”

Dennis huffs. “Whatever.” 

“Hmm.” Hands on hips, Mac steps away from the wall but continues looking at the thermostat with his nose all scrunched up consternation. “Says it’s set to 68 degrees.”

“Bullshit. It’s hotter than Satan’s taint in here.”

“I’m just reading what the thing says, dude.”

“Well, obviously it’s broken!”

“I know it’s broken! I’m just telling you what it says!”

“I know what it says! You just told me!”

“Then why are you yelling at me?!”

“I’m not yelling! You’re the one who’s yelling!” 

“Jesus Christ.” Mac pinches the bridge of his nose. “Okay, I’m just going to go get someone to fix it.”

Dennis opens his mouths. Shuts it. “Yeah—okay, yeah, that’s good.” 

“Alright.” Mac stomps towards the door. 

“Hey, wait, take off my fucking shoes!” Dennis shouts, but Mac keeps stomping. “You at least better be wearing socks! I am _not _about to start passing foot warts back and forth again, you _know _how hard those are to get rid—” 

The door shuts with a bang. Dennis collapses back onto the pillows. The foot wart fight is pointless. He knew it was pointless when he started it; he just wanted to be mad at Mac. The truth is, if Mac does have foot warts, Dennis will get them sooner or later. No point in delaying the inevitable.

* * *

“I should have never agreed to this,” Dee says. 

The Waitress’s fingers still in Dee’s hair. “Am I hurting you?”

“What? No, no, I’m not talking about _this_.” 

_“This_”is the Waitress french-braiding Dee’s hair, which, like, yeah. You get two girls together in a room with nothing to do, eventually they’re gonna start playing with each other’s hair. Dee remembers that from high school. Well, she remembers other girls doing it a lot, least. She only did it a few times, and only when another girl asked. For some reason, she was too nervous to ask someone herself. “I meant the bet,” Dee says.

“Well, I don’t blame you,” the Waitress says, her fingers brushing through the ends of Dee’s hair below the half-done braid. They skim lightly across Dee’s scalp and sometimes down her neck, giving her goosebumps. “It’s _very_ understandable that you don’t want to live with Mac and Dennis.” 

“Right?!” 

“Yeah. I have totally sympathy for you. I can’t even imagine what it’d be like to live with them.”

“It’s miserable!”

“I bet it’d be even worse after this, once they start banging.”

“Ha, yeah,” Dee agrees without thinking, then actually registers what the Waitress said. “Hang on. Once they _what _now?”

“I mean, obviously there’s sexual tension, right? And now they’re aware of it. It’s not like they can just lock all that back up.”

“Sure they can! They’ll just, y’know, stuff it down deep. Keep an eye on it.” 

“Or, you know, they could just, like, get together and be happy.” 

“Oh, _god_,” Dee snorts. “That’s hilarious. You should write for the Shouts and Murmurs.” 

“Shit, I messed up, I’m gonna start over,” the Waitress tells her, brushing out the unfinished braid. As she parts Dee’s hair into chunks again, she asks, “Why are you so against it, anyway? It’s not like it would affect _you_.”

“It doesn’t affect me?! Do you have any _idea _what Dennis is like after a breakup?”

“No, but it’s kind of weird how you just jumped straight to the breakup there.”

Dee frowns. “How is that weird?”

“Well, what if they don’t break up?”

“They absolutely would.”

“What if they didn’t, though?” The Waitress’s deft fingers work up the braid.

“Okay. Sure. Yeah, let’s explore that. _If _there _were _actually some universe out there where Mac and Dennis actually managed to ‘date’ or whatever dumb thing they’d end up calling it—and that’s a _huge _if—there’s no way they wouldn’t be one of those couples that breaks up every other day _minimum_. Mac doesn’t refill the ice cube tray? Breakup. Dennis talks about how hot Tom Brady is? Breakup. Mac smiles at a cute waiter? Oh god, _that _breakup would probably last _months_. And then who do you think Dennis goes running to when Mac’s not around? Who do you think gets to peel his apples and pick out all of the goddamn M&Ms from his fucking trail mix? Because I’ll give you a hint, it’s _not_ Frank or Charlie.” 

The Waitress’s fingers keep weaving away. “Wait. Why doesn’t he just buy trail mix without M&Ms?”

Dee has to shut her eyes; the answer is so idiotic, it causes her physical pain every time she has to think about it. “Because he thinks you can still taste the _aura_ of chocolate and that can curb sugar cravings.”

“Oh, _wow_.”

“Yeah, he’s a fucking dumbass. Granted, Mac is a dumbass too, which is why _he’s _fine being on M&M removal duty. But me? I don’t have time for that shit! I got my own stuff goin’ on.” 

“So...what I’m hearing you say is that Mac and Dennis are a match made in heaven.”

“Babe. Listen to me. You’re trying to divide by zero here.”

“I’m just saying—” 

Alright, that’s enough. Dee shoos the Waitress’s hands out of her hair and turns around to face her. “Look, I could write a fucking book on this topic, but I’ll give you the highlights. There are four main reasons why them dating would be a disaster. You ready?”

“I guess?”

“Good. First: Mac will never come out because he’s obsessed with Jesus. Dennis will never come out because he’s obsessed with his reputation. Second: Mac hates riddles, and Dennis is a goddamn Sphinx who has never been direct about anything in his life. Third: Mac is desperate for love, and Dennis gets off on being withholding. Fourth: Mac wears his heart on his sleeve, and Dennis is terrified of being loved. Those are like four fundamental personality clashes. There’s no way anyone can change _that _much.”

“Wow. Okay.” The Waitress takes a second to process Dee’s brilliance, and then says, “Okay, so, first of all—you expect me to believe that Dennis is afraid of being loved? He thinks he’s _God_. He doesn’t just want to be loved, he wants to be worshipped.”

“Worshipped, sure—but worshipped for who he _wants _to be,” Dee argues. “Being loved, though? Loved for who he actually _is_? And not just by anyone, but by someone who he actually cares about in return? He _hates _that. I mean, it’s not like it happens to him a _ton_, but when it does, he runs as fast and as far away as he possibly can, and then—” 

Hang on.

Now _there’s _an interesting idea. 

“And what?” the Waitress prompts. 

“Shh!” Dee holds up a finger while she lets the plan fall into place, then urgently asks, “Can I see your phone?”

“Uh, I guess?”

She pulls something out of the pocket of her hoodie and hands it to Dee, who stares at it for a second before asking, “What the fuck is this?”

“...my phone.” 

“_This_ is your phone?” Dee cackles. It’s one of those Nokia bricks from the late 90s, holy shit. 

“It’s a solid phone!”

“It’s an _antique_!” 

“Well, if you’re gonna be a bitch about it—” 

The Waitress grabs at her phone, but Dee holds it up, easily out of the Waitress’s reach. “Easy there, short stuff. I’m messing with you. Seriously, though does this thing even have texting? Because that’s a vital part of my plan.”

“Of course it has texting. All mobile phones have texting.”

“_‘Mobile_ phones’? Jesus Christ.” Dee starts fiddling around with it. “Call it a cell phone like a normal person. Or even just a phone.” 

“Just, like, don’t send too many texts, because each one costs twenty-five cents—” 

Dee hardly hears her. 

“Uh…do you mind telling me what you’re doing?”

Dee pulls her own phone out of her back pocket and sets it on the floor next to the Waitress’s, going back and forth between each of them. “I’m winning the bet.”

“...can you be more specific?”

“I’m gonna get Dennis to run as fast and as far away as he possibly can.”

“Oh god, please don’t text Dennis from my phone—” 

“I’m not texting _Dennis _from your phone,” Dee explains while getting everything in order. “I’m texting _myself _from your phone. And then I’m gonna put your contact name in _my_ phone as ‘Mac.’ And then I’m gonna screenshot the text on my phone. And then I’m gonna call Dennis and send him the screenshot, and when he reads it, I guarantee you that he’ll be out of that room and on the road faster than a bat out of hell.” 

It might be the most brilliant plan Dee has ever come up with. She reads over the text she typed up on the Waitress’s phone (which, by the way, took forever because Dee only has one hand and the phone doesn’t even have T9 for Christ’s sake) and hits send. 

“That oughta do it.”

Dee’s phone vibrates when the text is delivered. She tries to take a screenshot but it’s hard with only one hand; she gives it to the Waitress and shows her how to do it instead. 

“Yeah, I think Dennis is gonna know that Mac didn’t write this.”

“That’s weird,” Dee muses sarcastically. “I don’t remember asking for your opinion. I remember asking you to take a screenshot, so, y’know, click click, bitch.” 

“I don’t think this is gonna work, ”the Waitress says, shaking her head, but she takes the screenshot anyway and hands the phone back to Dee. “I mean, I don’t know Mac super well, but I’m _pretty _sure he would never say that.”

“Oh, he _definitely _wouldn’t.” Dee says, searching for Dennis in her contacts. “But Dennis isn’t even going to read that part. He’ll just get through the first bit and then he’s gonna book it out of here as fast as he can, and by the time he reads the rest of it and realizes it was me, he’ll be back in Philadelphia. Like a serial killer’s calling card. Shh! It’s ringing.”

After a few rings, Dennis picks up. “What the fuck do you want?”

Okay. Time to call upon all her acting training. Dee closes her eyes, mentally steps into character, takes on an urgent tone, and say, “Dennis, I need to talk to you about something.”

“Yeah, no shit. Why else would you call me?”

“But you have to go somewhere private so Mac can’t hear you.”

“_Ugh_.”

“Well—it’s just that he sent me a really weird text, and I think you should—” 

“I don’t give a shit! The A/C is broken and I have the _worst _hangover I’ve _ever _had in my _life _and the _very _last thing in the world that I want to deal with right now is your _incessant squawking_.” God, he’s _so _melodramatic. “Goodbye.”

“Wait wait wait, don’t hang up, don’t hang up! Just—go in the hall or something, this’ll only take a second.”

“Mac’s not even here, he left to go get someone to fix the A/C like fifteen minutes ago.” 

“Oh, that’s _perfect_!”

“Why is that perfect?”

“Uh—because—nothing. I’m gonna send you the screenshot, hang on.” Dee taps away on her phone and sends the screenshot to Dennis. “Did you get it?”

“Yeah, yeah, I—” 

Somehow, Dee knows exactly when Dennis goes from languishing in bed with yet another one of his “worst-ever” hangovers to sitting bolt-upright in bed. When Dennis speaks again, he sounds infinitely more awake: “Oh my god.”

“Yeah, it’s bad, huh?” Dee winks at the Waitress. This is going _so well_.

“What—what do I—what do I do? What do I do?” Oh, he’s _hysterical_. Delicious. 

“I don’t know,” 

“It’s _four in the morning_, Dee! Where am I supposed to go at_ four in the goddamn morning_?!” 

“I don’t know.” 

“_Fuck_.” Frenzied rustling sounds come through the phone, probably from Dennis haphazardly throwing his shit together, and then the line clicks, and then silence. Dee looks at her phone.

“Well?” the Waitress asks, eager for updates in spite of herself.

Dee smirks, shaking her head. “Honestly, it’s almost _too_ easy,” she says.


	9. "Secrets Secrets Are No Fun; Secrets Secrets, Everyone!"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Charlie goes all Inception on Mac; Mac regrets skipping cardio day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry, y'all. This has taken forever to get up. I took a break from this fic to write my big bang fic, and like the EXACT SAME DAY I posted that fic, all the COVID shit started to hit the fan. So...yeah, it's been forever. I think I last posted in December?! Whatever. No one's paying attention to days or months or years anymore, right? [yikes emoji] I've been noodling with this chapter basically since December and at this point I'm just sick of it and I can't look at it anymore. So I hope it's okay. 
> 
> Anyway. This chapter has no right being this long. I have no idea how or why it’s this long, but this point, this fic is Angelica Pickles and I’m just Uncle Stu [making her chocolate pudding at four in the morning.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIR68SbPg-U)
> 
> TWs:  
-Use of the word “sociopath” in a derogatory way  
-Canon-typical violence  
-Vomiting (although note that I wrote this and I’m a severe emetophobe so it’s not graphic at all)

Previously, in this fic...

Frank and Charlie are trying to win a bet by tricking Mac and Dennis into having sex. Dee’s on the other side of the bet, so she’s trying to prevent them from hooking up. Thanks to her, Mac and Dennis are aware of the whole thing, and so far, they have gone to a hotel in the Poconos, pretended to be a couple, pretended to get engaged, gotten stuck in an elevator, which they eventually escaped through erotic subterfuge (i.e., making out in front of the security camera). Then Dennis gets blackout drunk and tells Mac he doesn't really care about him. Mac is sad. 

Also, Dee enlists the help of the Waitress to go up to the hotel to sabotage Frank and Charlie. They run into Charlie, who’s trying to fuck with the heating system as part of the bet, and the Waitress knocks him out with a frozen fish. Dee and the Waitress are caught by hotel staff and sent to Hotel Jail, where Dee fakes a text message from Mac and sends a screenshot of it to Dennis while Mac is off trying to fix the heater. Whatever it says, it makes Dennis run away. 

* * *

If someone had asked Charlie before tonight, Hey, Charlie, how would you feel about going blind?, he would have said, I would not like that at all, thank you very much. 

But now that he’s gone blind for real, he’s feeling very Zen about the whole thing. After all, he’s still got all his fingers. That’s something to be grateful for. He’d be way more upset to lose his fingers. He wouldn’t be able to touch things, and Charlie likes to touch things—slippery things, slimy things, soft things, smooth things, and speaking of things, there’s a thing underneath him, smooth and hard, and Charlie touches it with all of his fingers, which he is very grateful to have right now, and discovers that underneath him is a floor. Not a feral floor, but smooth tile, maybe linoleum; not concrete or wood, definitely not dirt, but then again, it couldn’t be dirt, could it, because dirt is never called “floor.” A floor made of dirt is maybe just called “the ground.” If it’s outside, that is. If it's inside, it's called “a goddamn mess.” Charlie knows this from personal experience

Then, a miracle happens, suddenly, as miracles usually do: Charlie can see again. Or, well, he can see _something_, at least: a light of some kind, bright white, too bright, in fact, which he was not ready for. Technicolor images of optic veins dance around in front of him as he struggles to keep his stinging eyes open. The situation is clear now: Charlie isn’t blind. He’s just dead. 

Charlie would have thought he’d be even more upset about being dead than going blind, but instead it’s just kind of like whatever. Honestly, most people on earth make such a big fuss about death— Charlie was one of them—but now he can’t remember why it seemed so terrible. It’s too bright, sure, but that's fine. There are a lot of things Charlie’s learning right now, about himself and the world around him. Like, for example, he’d be okay with being blind, and death is nothing to go crazy over, and Mac was right about the whole Heaven thing all along, because that’s obviously where they are right now, what with the bright white light and all, and when the shape of a man materializes from within the light, Charlie has a pretty good guess as to who it is. “God?”

On God’s face forms a bepuzzled frown. He looks over His shoulder, like He’s trying to figure out who Charlie is talking to. Before He can say anything, though, the puzzle pieces fall into place in Charlie’s brain. “Wait a second—Mac?!”

Of _course _it’s Mac, though. That makes perfect sense. Out of the gang, Mac is the one most likely to get into Heaven, what with him bein’ all tight with Jesus and shit. “Oh fuck. Mac, you’re dead too?” 

“What? No, I’m—” The words snap out of Mac's mouth like he’s never heard anyone say something stupider, but then his jaw clamps shut and his eyes go all shifty. For a second, Charlie thinks Mac’s about to dash out of the room, but then it’s like a switch flips in his brain and he says, “Uh, yeah, dude, I’m dead. _Suuuper_ dead.” 

“And I am too?”

“And you are too,” Mac confirms quickly, then says, much slower, “So _I’m not really here_. That’s the important thing to be aware of right now. Understand? I'm not really here.” 

Okay, now Charlie’s starting to recall why this whole death thing is not so great. Actually, it’s downright freaky, and Charlie would love it if Mac _were_ here with him so they could face this freaky shit together, just like they always have. But Mac _isn’t_ here, not physically. Mac and Charlie being together is officially impossible, now and forever. They’re never going to get to hang out again. _That’s_ why people are afraid of death, Charlie remembers now: they're worried about missing their friends.

He starts to scream. 

But he barely gets a good one out before Mac slaps his palm over Charlie’s mouth, falling to his knees on the floor next to him. “Shut _up_, dude,” Mac hisses. “You’re gonna wake everyone up.” 

This information takes priority over the screaming. “People still need to sleep in Heaven? That's horseshit. I thought Heaven was supposed to be awesome.” 

Mac opens his mouth and closes it a few times, looking a little panicked, until he says, reluctantly, “I lied. We’re not in Heaven.”

“Okay, now I’m _really_ freaked out, because that means we’re in—”

“No, no!” Mac shakes his head urgently. “We’re not in Hell either. We’re not—we’re not really dead.”

"We're _not_?! Oh, _shit_, then that's—this is bad, you’re not supposed to see me—”

“Shh, shh, calm down, it’s fine! We're not dead but I'm still not seeing you. You’re just, uh, you’re dreaming."

"I am?"

"Yup. You’re having a dream right now.”

Charlie lets out a stream of giddy laughter. “Oh, man. _That’s_ a relief.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“I just got one question though.”

“What?”

“...Am I peeing?” 

“Jesus Christ.” Mac shuts his eyes, head tilted back just a bit, like he’s in pain. “I don’t know and I don’t care.” 

“Y’know what? I don’t care either.” Charlie tries to wave the whole thing off, but the movement makes the whole room spin. 

Mac’s whole vibe changes abruptly from annoyed to concerned. “Hey, man, you don’t look so good.” 

“It’s jus’ a dream,” Charlie says, eyes closed now, barely moving his mouth. 

Nothing in dreams makes sense, though, so Mac scoots closer to him anyway and shifts into Doctor Mode. He pulls at Charlie’s eyelids to examine whatever’s there, then feels around his skull. “Follow my finger with your eyes.” Mac holds up one finger and moves it back and forth in front of Charlie’s face. Charlie watches it. It makes his head hurt. “Do you think you have a concussion?”

“Like, in real life?”

Mac nods.

“Oh, for sure,” Charlie says easily. “I didn’t even know that was up for debate.” 

“Jesus, Charlie.”

“That’s why I thought I was dead, dude.” 

“What the hell happened?”

“Ah, you know me, I just hit a fish that was in the brain. You know how it is.”

“..._what_?”

“Oh, I don’t know, man. I’m also like the _tiniest _bit stoned, so. Don’t ask me.” 

“You are impossible.” Mac stands and paces around the room in Dennis’s sneakers because dreams are weird like that. “You know that, right? You are endlessly frustrating.”

“So what? None of this is real. And thank god, honestly, because I’d be in a _lot_ of trouble if it—hey, you’re all sweaty.”

“Yeah, dude, the heat or the A/C or whatever, it’s all fucked up in our room. It’s like 90 degrees in there right now,” Mac says. “That’s actually why I came in here in the first place. I’m trying to fix it.” 

“Ah, sorry about that, dude. That’s on me. But—hey, I guess this isall in my head, so it probably didn’t work in real life. That’s good.”

Mac is all up in Charlie’s face again, and he looks _mad_. “What didn’t work, Charlie?” 

“The thing I did,” Charlie says. “With the heater or whatever. It’s broken in the dream but it’s probably fine in real life.”

“Are you saying that _you _broke the heater?” 

“Well, I _tried_ to. See?” Charlie nods at the box on the wall, now surrounded by black scorch marks. 

Mac twists around to look at it. “Oh, _fuck you_, dude.”

“You shouldn’t be angry,” Charlie says. “This is a dream. You should do something that doesn’t make any sense. Like ballet.” 

“Oh my god, just—I’m gonna kill you, bro. In real life. You understand that? I’m—” But before Mac can finish his thought, something in the air hooks its fingers into his nostrils and yanks his attention away from Charlie. He sniffs at the air like a dog. “Do you smell something?”

Charlie sniffs too, and yeah, there is some kind of sickly-sweetly-putrid stench floating around them. “Yeah, I think I’m gettin’ a whiff of something. It’s not, like, a bad smell, it’s just kinda..._fishy_.” He looks up at Mac. “You think it’s the ocean?”

“We’re nowhere near the ocean,” Mac mutters like he’s brushing off a mosquito. Now he’s roaming around the room, focused on his sniffing. He’s very methodical about it. Charlie watches Mac as he goes about finding the source of the smell, narrowing it down to a smaller and smaller space until he’s basically spinning in circles, like a dog chasing its own tail, and then he gives up suddenly with a shrug. “I dunno. Maybe the stench of fish is embedded in my skin from living with Dee.”

“Oh, that’s right, she got all covered in fish guts at the factory, didn’t she?” Charlie laughs. “Man, that was some crazy shit." 

Mac is still pissed off, but he laughs anyway. "You know, sometimes I wonder if we're getting _too_ weird." 

"Well, it's like Frank says. We don't know how many years we got left on this earth..." 

"We're gonna get real weird with it," they finish what could be the gang's mission statement together. Mac nods and continues, "Yeah, you're right." 

"But your fish factory thing was a bad scheme. It didn’t even _work_.”

“It did so!”

“Nah, man, even after all that planning and sneaking around, and you and Dennis didn’t even get to bust a nut. That sucks, man.” 

“How—how do you know that?” Mac sputters. “Did Dennis tell you that?”

“Call it the threshold of revelation.” Charlie winks. It hurts. “Ow.” 

“Bullshit.”

“I’m serious! I just _know_ things when I’m dreaming. I mean, I’m right, aren’t I?”

“Well, I—I don’t know about Dennis, but—personally? I guess I _technically _haven’t, but—it’s not—I’m not—” Mac pivots to accusation: “_You _kept interrupting us!”

“I’m not denying that. I’m only saying it didn’t work. Anyway, you should’ve just told me about it. I could’ve _helped_.”

Mac groans and covers his face in his hands. “We told you. That’s too many people.”

“I don’t mean like—” An idea pops into his brain. “Hey, if you’re in my dream right now, do you think I’m in your dream too?”

“I don’t know. Who am I, Sigmund Floyd?” 

“Whatever. The thing is, I wanna tell you something, something that’ll help you. But Frank won’t let me. Wants me to keep it secret.”

Every trace of Mac’s anger disappears instantly, replaced by hunger. There’s nothing Mac loves more than being let in on a secret. “What is it?” 

“Well, I promised Frank I wouldn’t tell you.”

“But I’m your best friend! Who the fuck is _Frank_?” He says his name like it’s another word for vermin. 

“Well, he’s my other best friend.”

“No, _Dennis_ is your other best friend.”

“Okay, Frank is my _other_ otherbest friend. And also my roommate,” Charlie says, then adds, “And also probably my dad.” 

“But—"

“Okay, guy, chill out, order in the court over here,” Charlie says. “I’m just tryin’ to say, if you’re also dreaming right now, then I’m thinkin’ maybe if I tell you the secret inside a _dream_, then it’s like, more bang for your buck.”

Mac furrows his brow. “I don’t think that’s the right saying there.”

“Okay, two birds with one stone, then.”

“_Is_ it two birds with one stone?” Mac’s frown deepens as he gazes off to the side, thoroughly sidetracked now. 

“Oh! I know. It’s like _Inception_.” 

That gets Mac’s attention. “Awesome. I call Tom Hardy.” 

“Great, I’m Leo. Come closer.” 

Mac squats down in front of Charlie. 

“Closer.”

Mac leans in. 

“Closer.”

“Dude, I can smell your breath from here.”

“Okay, fine. Here it is. Are you ready? 

Mac nods.

“_Wallet_.”

Confusion lines Mac’s face. “Wallet,” he repeats.

“Yeah.”

“…You got anything else?” 

“Dude, I can’t tell you any more than that. Frank won’t believe it was a dream if I spell it out for you.” 

“But I won’t tell him!”

“Nope. Too risky. That’s it. Just: wallet.” Trying to look like Leo in Inception, Charlie squints meaningfully at Mac, who’s gone a little fuzzy around the edges. The image starts to kaleidoscope, with more and more Macs floating around, rainbowy flares shooting out from the light on the ceiling. “Anyway, good luck, bro. I think I gotta go somewhere else in my brain now.” 

“No—Charlie, wait—” sixteen Macs shout in unison.

"Oh. One las’ thing..." 

"What?!" 

"...I'm peein’." 

"Jesus Christ," say thirty-two Macs. The last thing Charlie sees is sixty-four Macs jumping away from him—and then everything goes black. 

* * *

The way Mac sees it, he is well within his rights to leave Charlie here, slumped over and concussed and sitting in his own piss on the floor of a large utility closet. No one would argue that. In the past week, Charlie has committed many Crimes Against Friendship, including planting a camera in Mac and Dennis’s (and Dee’s) apartment, cutting off their internet, breaking and entering, lying, manipulating, keeping secrets (what the _fuck_ is this thing with a wallet?), and generally contributing to a mass conspiracy to ruin Mac’s friendship with Dennis. Charlie definitely deserves some karmic retribution. 

But as much as Mac would like to abandon Charlie and forget about the whole thing, he has always been the kind of man that chooses to take the high road. 

So he leaves a note.

Using a pencil he finds hanging by a clipboard on the wall and a label torn off a container of bleach, Mac writes: “CALL FRANK IF FOUND.” He drops the note in Charlie’s lap, and then he gets the hell out of there. 

When Mac unlocks the door to their hotel room, he’s ready to verbally rip Charlie to shreds with Dennis. “Dude, guess who the fuck I just ran into?” 

He’s greeted by silence and total darkness. 

“Dennis?” Mac says. “Did you go back to sleep?”

No response. Mac flicks on the lights to find that the room is empty. Still disgustingly hot (shit, Mac forgot all about that) but completely empty. There’s nothing in the bathroom, either—none of man Dennis’s many toiletries and makeup bags are there. 

Goddamn it. 

But a quick check out the window confirms that the Range Rover is still in the parking lot, so there’s still time to catch the bastard.

The abrupt blast of cold air against Mac’s bare chest practically knocks him over when he bursts through the front doors of the hotel, but a few hundred feet away is Dennis, walking fast with the hood of his coat pulled up tight around his head, like he’s a celebrity trying to hide from the paparazzi. 

“Hey asshole!” Mac shouts as loudly as he can (which honestly isn’t very loud, because every breath of freezing air is like knives in his throat and lungs, ice-cold and cruel). “Get back here!” 

The shout bounces off the mountains around them, but Dennis doesn’t turn around, just picks up his pace, and soon enough, Mac is flat-out chasing him down across the hotel parking lot. 

Mac has been keeping something secret himself: he’s been skipping cardio day. Because who gives a shit about cardio, right? He's already a good (well, adequate) runner, and cardio doesn't do shit to build mass. His bis, tris, pecs are out of this world, and those are the muscles that people see, so those are the muscles that count. God _Himself_ said that Mac was looking pumped, so obviously his workout routine has been working. And regret really isn’t Mac’s style—there are more important things to think about than all of the so-called "mistakes” he’s made in the past—but right now, he's kicking himself for not sucking it up and training for long-distance running, because now his calves are burning and his lungs are on fire and his heart is pounding like it’s going to explode right out of his chest like the xenomorphs in _Alien_. 

Dennis, however, has always had a natural ability for cardio, superhuman douchebag that he is. The asshole runs like a goddamn gazelle person: he makes it to the Range Rover with plenty of time to spare. 

Right when Mac is about to throw up his hands in defeat, Dennis fumbles with his keys before he manages to get them into the lock, and Mac uses those extra few seconds to gain on him. Dennis manages to unlock the door and chucks his duffel bag inside. Mac is almost there, only about twenty feet away, when Dennis jumps into the driver’s seat and pulls the door shut with a bang. After a cough and sputter that is characteristic of this particular Range Rover, the ignition turns over and the car lurches forward. 

With a running leap, an empty head, and nothing left to lose, Mac hurls himself onto the hood of the Range Rover. 

Dennis slams on the brakes, which causes Mac to slide right off front the hood and land hard on the pavement. It’s definitely going to hurt later, but right now his body is completely numb from the cold, which allows Mac get back on his feet with no problem. He slams his hands down on the hood of the car, and glares through the windshield at an irate Dennis, who has no choice now but to glare back. 

By now, Mac’s lungs are acting of their own accord, gulping down breath after breath after breath. The only sound he can hear is his heart pounding, with every beat his vision growing a bit dimmer, and his hands and feet are going kind of numb. But everything is fine. Everything is good. In fact, everything is _awesome_, because that was _fucking badass_. 

All that’s left is to deliver the final zinger—and it’s gotta be a good one, a line so undeniably awesome that he and Dennis will be telling this story until the day they die, like, _Hey, remember that time you threw yourself onto the hood of the Range Rover while I was driving it and you said_—

Mac vomits on the hood of the Range Rover.

(Okay, so maybe Mac didhave something left to lose.) 

The next few moments are swallowed up in a dark, nauseous fever dream: Mac is inside something dark brown and red and sweltering, grayish blue veins pulsing within meaty walls, viscera and blood and guts. When he comes to a few seconds later, Dennis has caught him before hitting the ground, his arms hooked under Mac’s. 

“Shit, man,” Mac groans, letting himself be lowered all the way to the pavement. “That was gonna be _so _badass.” 

Dennis disappears, leaving Mac lying there to stew in his own thoughts, which (it should go without saying) is the worst place for Mac to stew. Fuck. 

This must be what people mean when they say “rock bottom.” The hard pavement is rough on Mac’s bare back. It’s below freezing. His best friend is being an asshole and might never speak to him again. His _other _best friend is being an asshole and is sitting in a puddle of his own urine. And, worst of all, it’s now an undeniable fact that he’s gonna have to suck it up and do cardio day. Everything is so fucking awful that Mac finds himself feeling like it’d be great if this _was_ rock bottom, because then the only direction left to go would be—

“Up,” Dennis commands, reappearing out of nowhere with his hand reaching for Mac’s. It’s no olive branch. Mac takes it anyway. 

Behind Mac, with two hands on his shoulders to keep him steady, Dennis leads him to the car. There’s a blanket set out on the back seat, a shitty fleece thing Dennis keeps in the trunk that Mac now wraps around his bare shoulders once he climbs inside and sits. The acrid taste of vomit is still strong in Mac’s mouth, and right when the thought crosses his mind, he notices a half-frozen bottle of water on the seat next to him. Mac swishes the icy water around his mouth, leans out the door, and spits it on the ground. "Gross," Dennis comments, and then he shoves at Mac's shoulder until he gets the hint and slides over to make room in the back seat.

“That wasn’t because I’m out of shape, by the way,” Mac explains, preoccupied with scratching at the label on the water bottle. “I’m just—I’m hungover.” Dennis doesn't respond.

The floor of the car desperately needs to be vacuumed. Several months’ worth of crumbs and trash from the back seat gang (Dee, Charlie, and Frank) cover the carpet. It’s mostly Cheeto dust and Warhead wrappers, but Mac’s pretty sure that those are some discarded shrimp shells under the driver’s seat. 

Behind the driver’s seat are Mac’s combat boots, and he’s startled when he realizes that they are on Dennis’s feet. Mac moves his own foot a little, the sensation he feels when Dennis’s sneaker moves instead of the combat boot is downright disorienting. It's like when you try to give yourself a haircut in the mirror, which you wouldn’t think would be that hard, but for some reason the reflection completely fucks up your coordination and you end up stabbing yourself in the face with your scissors. 

A long time passes before Mac’s floor-gazing trance is broken. The sky is brightening the faintest bit, the first hint of dawn trying to shine through the clouds, and Mac can’t believe that, not even twelve hours ago, he and Dennis were dancing together in front of a bunch of people, pretending to be in love, pretending to be happy. Not even pretending, actually—in that moment, Mac really _was_ happy. It seemed like Dennis was too. But now it’s a new day, and everything Mac thought he knew has been thrown into doubt. 

He finally hazards a glance at Dennis out of the corner of his eye, half-expecting (or maybe half-hoping) that he’d fallen asleep. But Dennis is staring straight ahead, doing that creepy dead-behind-the-eyes routine he does, where he goes completely still and expressionless. It’s never been clear to Mac whether it’s an intimidation tactic or some sort of coping mechanism for poorly adjusted sociopaths, but whatever it is, Mac wants him to stop it. Hesitantly, he starts: “Look, I just wanna say—”

“Don’t,” Dennis interrupts, quiet and sharp, his mouth barely moving.

“Uh, okay." After a second, Mac asks, "Don’t what?”

“Whatever you were going to say to me, don’t say it.” 

“What are you—"

“Don’t play dumb.”

“But you don't know what I was going to say.” 

“Actually, I do. And I can assure you, I don’t want to hear it. Got it?” Dennis snaps his head around to glare directly at Mac. 

The sudden direct eye contact catches Mac off guard, and his first instinct is to instantly crack under the pressure before it gets to that and let Dennis win this round. Except Mac has literally no idea how to go about doing that. He doesn’t even know the general category of things that he should admit to. So Mac just stares back, trying to look as stupid and clueless as possible. 

“Dee sent me a screenshot,” Dennis explains at last. 

“Okay.” Mac waits for the rest of the explanation, but that appears to be it. “A screenshot of what?” he prompts, fighting to keep his voice calm and even, like he’s trying not to spook a feral cat. 

“‘A screenshot of what!’” Dennis mimics cruelly. “A screenshot of the text you sent her, asshole.”

“Text?” Mac repeats. “Dennis, I haven’t texted Dee since our group text last night. You’ve seen every text I’ve sent her in the last 24 hours.” 

Dennis nods tightly. “You're right. Let’s go with that. We’ll just pretend you never sent it.” 

“I’m serious, dude. What did Dee send you?”

“Why are you still playing dumb? I already know. You don’t have to lie about it.” 

“I’m not lying!” Mac shouts, then immediately clenches down on the mounting rage. He takes a hard breath in through his nose. He can’t get let himself get heated right now. That’s not how to win an argument with Dennis. “Look, man. You said it yourself: I have no reason to lie. If I did know what you were talking about, and I knew that _you_ knew, then don’t you think I’d have admitted it by now?” 

Dennis scoffs. “Are you seriously trying to use logic on me?” 

“That depends. Is it working?” There are a million other things Mac wants to say, but he forces himself to keep quiet until he sees uncertainty flicker over Dennis’s face real quick, the mental equivalent of hearing someone’s stomach growl. 

“You didn’t text her,” Dennis says, halfway between a question and a statement. 

“I swear to God. You can even check my phone, hang on.” Mac digs around in his sweatpants pockets for. 

“You could have deleted it.” 

Mac rolls his eyes at that. “Come on, Dennis, everyone knows you can’t delete texts.” Dennis opens his mouth to protest, but Mac continues, “Fuck, I must have left my phone in the hotel room. I’ll go get it.”

Mac reaches for the door handle, but Dennis stops him with a hand on his upper arm. “I’m not letting you go alone.” The statement momentarily sweeps Mac off his feet (not in a gay way, though, just in the way that a friend sweeps another friend off of his feet), but then Dennis clarifies, “You could delete it on your way back.”

“How many times do I have to tell you! You can't delete—ugh, never mind,” Mac says, bitterly disappointed that Dennis refuses to understand text messaging. “We’ll go together, then.” 

“Okay.” Dennis nods, but he doesn’t make a move to go. 

After a long pause, during which it becomes clear to Mac that they're not going to get his phone, he asks, “Why would I be texting _Dee_, of all people?”

Dennis shrugs. “Maybe because Charlie can’t read and Frank’s a piece of shit?” 

“Yeah, but Dee is a piece of shit too, which is why I text _you_. I never text just Dee. We barely even have a text thing with only the two of us. It’s always her and you, or her and Charlie, or her and you and Frank, or—”

“Yes, okay, I get your point,” Dennis interrupts. After a second, Dennis takes his phone out of his jacket pocket. He fiddles with it for a little while, then his eyes move left to right as he reads something. “Oh, goddamnit. She fucking—Dee, you horrible, ugly, disgusting, vile, conniving—"

“What?”

“It’s a fake text.” Dennis slaps his dumb nerdy wallet-phone-case shut and throws his head back against the seat, a pained look pinching his face. 

“So…can I see it?”

Dennis's fingers tighten around the phone in his lap, which is at odds with the casual way he says, “It’s not a big deal.” 

“If it’s not a big deal, then just let me see it real quick.”

“It _really_ doesn’t matter.”

“Alright, I didn’t want to play this card so soon, but: you were going to _abandon _me here. I have a right to know why.”

“You’re trying to play the _sympathy_ card? Do you even know me?” Dennis doesn’t lift his head off the seat, just tilts his chin down a bit so he can give Mac a proper death stare. “Well, then I'm gonna play the right-to-privacy card, which is in the U.S. Constitution, so just drop it or I’ll throw you out of this vehicle and I really _will_ abandon you here.” 

“Fine. Jesus Christ. You can cool it with the theatrics, Meryl.”

“Eat my ass.” 

“Bet you’d love that,” Mac mutters, pouting out the window. “So I guess we don’t need to go get my phone?"

“No.” 

The silence grows just long enough for Dennis to be lulled back into a false sense of security—and then Mac pounces. They struggle for a moment, cursing at each other. Mac shoves at Dennis’s face with his hand, but Dennis whacks Mac in the jaw with his elbow and manages to free the hand holding his phone. He holds it up and just out of Mac’s reach, and then, when Mac won't stop grabbing at it, he throws it over the back seat into the trunk.

Mac claws his way over the back of the seat and Dennis follows. It’s still dark enough that they both have to feel around for the phone. Dennis finds it first. Mac launches himself at Dennis and wrestles him to the floor of the car, straddling his hips and pinning his wrists above his head. 

This may not have been a smart dumb move, Mac realizes now, because both of his hands are occupied, and Dennis is still holding the phone. If Mac were to grab at it, he’d have to let go of one of Dennis’s wrists, and then Dennis would get the upper hand again. 

As Mac tries to calculate his next move, he’s distracted by the sound of their ragged panting, and the fact that Dennis has gone completely still underneath him. Not limp, just _still_. They make eye contact in the dim light, and out of nowhere, Mac understands that the rules of this game have suddenly changed: _If Dennis doesn't give Mac the phone in the next few seconds, then Mac is going to kiss him_. From the look on Dennis's face, it’s clear that he's on the exact same page. Dennis licks his lips, his eyes bright. Mac leans in. 

“Fine,” Dennis bites out suddenly, shoving his phone into Mac's chest. “Take it.” 

Mac dismounts from Dennis, who keeps lying on his back on the floor of the car, and takes the phone. He types in the passcode (6969), and screenshot of a text from Mac never wrote is already open on the screen: 

_Hi Dee, this is Mac, and I just wanna say I’m sorry but we’re going to lose the bet. This whole thing has made me realize that I AM in love with Dennis; I think I’ve been in love with him since I first met him but I just couldn’t see it until now, and I think he’s in love with me, too. I can tell by the way he looks at me. I’m going to tell Dennis that I’m in love with him as soon as I get a chance. _

_Also, you are way smarter and funnier than any of the gang. I’m so sorry we’re so mean to you, we’re total assholes, and you don’t look like a bird at all, I’m going to make sure the guys stop with that and also I’m pro-choice now._

By the time Mac finishes reading, he’s straight-up howling with laughter. “You thought _I _wrote this?” 

“I don’t know, I—I wasn’t thinking clearly. I was tired.” 

“You seriously thought I would use that stupid thing with the period on top of the comma?”

“That's a _semicolon_, asshole.” 

“I may be an asshole, but at least I’m not some kinda nerd,” Mac says in between wheezes of laughter. “Like, have you _ever_ seen me use one of those?”

“Well—” 

“And you seriously believed that I would say Dee was funny?” Mac snorts at the thought. “_Seriously_?” 

“I didn’t—I didn’t make it to that part,” Dennis mutters. “I stopped reading after the whole thing about—you know.” 

“Me being in love with you?” Mac teases. 

“I was _tired_.”

“So let me get this straight,” Mac says, getting more serious. “You _really _thought that I was going to tell you I was in _love _with you—”

“I WAS TIRED!” 

“—and your reaction was to just _abandon _me here?”

Dennis pushes himself up onto his elbows. “Of course it was! That’s the whole reason why Dee did it, don't you get that? She _knew _I’d react like that. She was trying to split us up, because for some unfathomable reason she’s suddenly terrified that we’re not going to be able to keep our dicks out of each other.”

“So…she thought you’d run away if I told you I loved you?” Mac says, trying to make sure he’s getting this right. “That’s so stupid.” 

“Yeah. Well. It worked.”

“But _why_?”

“Are you serious?” Dennis asks. “Why the hell would I want to stick around for that?”

“I don’t know.” Mac shivers, crossing his arms over his chest. He lost the blanket during their fight, and the heat from the adrenaline is wearing off. “It's just kind of a pussy move.”

“Oh, come on, dude. Don’t act like you wouldn’t do the exact same thing if you were in my shoes.”

Mac reaches over the back seat to get the blanket. He wraps it around himself again, and then sits with his back against the side of the car, across from Dennis. “I actually _am_ in your shoes right now, so you’re required by law to believe me.” Mac sticks out one of his feet and nudges Dennis’s with it. “And I’m saying, I wouldn’t abandon you.”

Dennis casts his eyes down, picking at his cuticles. “Really?” His voice is fragile.

“Not in a million years, bro,” Mac says, almost angry at how soft it sounds. It hangs in the air for a second and Mac swears it heats up the car at least half a degree.

It’s a little too syrupy, though, too sweet for the two of them. Dennis breaks the spell by crossing his arms, a playful challenge in the tilt of his head, and this—_this_ is good, Mac thinks, his spirits lifting. This is their normal rhythm. For the first time since the elevator, Mac feels wholly like himself. Dennis sits up fully and asks with a smirk, “Enlighten me, then. What _would_ you have done?”

“You mean, like, what would I do if you told me you were in love with me?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Hmm. Let’s see.” Mac taps a finger to his chin, pretending to give it some thought, even though he already knows exactly what he’d say. “If you told me you were in love with me, I’d tell you…I would say, you’re an important part of my life, and I don’t know what I’d do without you, and our friendship means a lot to me.” 

Dennis seems like he’s waiting. “_But…_”

“‘But’ what?”

“There has to be a ‘but’ in there somewhere! If you say all that but there’s no ‘but,’ then it just sounds like you’re in love with me too!”

“Hey, I’m trying to let you down easy here, bro!”

“In order to let me down easy, you have to actually _let me down_.” Dennis says it easily, like he's criticizing Mac's fashion choices or something.

“Okay, _fine_! Then I guess I’d tell you that you’re an important part of my life and I don’t know what I’d do without you and our friendship means a lot to me, _but_,” Mac says, emphasizing the word to make sure that Dennis doesn’t miss it, “I’m not gay.”

Dennis scoffs and rolls his eyes, and he opens his mouth like he’s about to point out another flaw in Mac’s outfit, but then he seems to think better of it, and he accepts the explanation with a small shrug and a nod. “Well. Consider me let down easy.”

“Mission accomplished, then.” 

Dennis looks at him and they smile at each other for maybe a second longer than strictly necessary, but Mac doesn’t care about necessity right now. 

Dennis is the first one to look elsewhere, rubbing the back of his neck the way he does when he’s trying to act casual. “C’mon, let’s go back to our room. I’m tired, I just wanna pass out.”

“We can’t, remember?”

“Huh?”

“Oh, shit, I haven’t even told you about all that, have I?” Mac remembers. “Alright. So. I was gonna get some hotel bozo to fix the heat like we said. But then I saw this room labeled ‘HVAC’ at the end of the hall, and I was like, My cousin does HVAC and he doesn't think caterpillars are real, so. ‘Can’t be that hard to fix,’ right?” He launches into the whole story about running into Charlie, Charlie thinking the whole thing was a dream, figuring out that Charlie did something to the heat, and Mac didn’t really know what he did, but there was some kind of circuit breaker box or control panel that was busted and had a big black scorch mark around it. 

“Jesus Christ, Charlie” Dennis curses, rolling his eyes. 

“I know, right?”

“He’s alive and shit, though?”

“Oh, yeah. I left a note. He’ll be fine.”

Dennis nods, satisfied. “Smart.” He rubs his hands together and blows on his fingers for warmth. “We should probably start planning Charlie’s murder. And Dee’s.”

“Yeah,” Mac laughs. “And Frank’s, while we’re at it.” 

“Oh, yeah, I’ve been planning that one for like seven years.” A pause, and then Dennis offers: “Sleep in the car?”

Mac shrugs. He’s slept in worse places. “Sure.” 

They turn the car's heater on, wordlessly agreeing to avoid the alternative, and lie down in the trunk, pressed to close to their respective sides. Dennis is snoring softly within minutes, while Mac is supposed to stay up to turn the heater off in a little bit, which isn’t a problem, since he wouldn't be able to fall asleep right now even if you paid him.

It’s unexplainable, this feeling Mac has. It’s definitely not a _good _feeling, even though it should be, because everything turned out fine. Mac caught Dennis before he could run away, they cleared up the confusion, they made a couple of jokes, they laughed, there was no further gay shit, and Dennis and him are still best friends. That’s an all-around win in Mac’s book. It just doesn’t_ feel_ like one.

Dennis thought Mac was going to make a love confession and his immediate instinct was to run away. Which, yeah, would suck for Mac if he _was _in love with Dennis, but he’s not, so it doesn’t make any sense why this fact is sticking in Mac’s throat like a tortilla chip he swallowed without chewing enough. 

Dennis _was_ going to leave him here with no car, though. That’s an undeniably shitty thing to do to someone, and Mac is well within his rights to be mad about that. And, for that matter, what kind of excuse did Dennis think he had, anyway? _Oh, I’m totally innocent here, I HAD to abandon you all alone at the Bumfuck Pennsylvania torture hotel because I was afraid you were going to tell me you loved me! _What kind of a reason is that to leave him behind? After all they’ve been through together? Because Mac wasn’t lying earlier, when he said he wouldn’t abandon him. You don’t throw away a perfectly good friendship just because someone falls a _tiny_ bit in love.

_Well_, says a small, mean voice in Mac’s head, _not unless you really don’t give a shit about them. _

So maybe Dennis was telling the truth earlier, when he said what he and Mac had was nothing special. Maybe he _doesn’t_ care. Maybe their entire friendship has been a lie. Maybe Dennis only keeps Mac there to laugh at, or to boss around. Oh, god...the past 25 years flicker past him like he’s speeding past road signs: Mac cooking, Mac washing dishes, Mac going to the grocery store, Mac sweeping, Mac vacuuming, Mac peeling apples, Mac making sure Dennis sleeps with a rope ladder in his room in case of fires. Mac does an _awful_ lot of stuff for Dennis, and he doesn't get a lot in return, but it’s never been a problem. There’s never been any resentment. The opposite, in fact—up until now, Mac was _grateful_, felt special that he was one of the people Dennis found worthy of keeping around. 

But now, a new wave of nausea crashes over Mac as he realizes the truth: for their entire friendship, Dennis has been having an affair with indifference. 

_Bzzt._

Mac almost yelps out loud at the sound, coming from Dennis’s phone. It’s just a message from Citizens’ Bank, a daily update on the balance in his and Dennis’s joint checking account. Boring. But then Mac realizes, his heart beating fast: Dennis is a pretentious douchebag and his phone is also a wallet now. 

A search through it, however, doesn’t yield much in the way of anything remotely interesting: some credit cards, a driver’s license, the D&B’s Powercard, a Wolf Cola business card that says “DENNIS REYNOLDS: Vice President of International Distribution,” some cash, Dee’s credit card, Frank’s credit card, and that’s it. 

Nothing else. Nothing to do with love, nothing to do with Mac, nothing even remotely personal. He still searches the wallet, looking for hidden pockets, but in his gut he knows that Charlie was full of shit. There’s no personality in this wallet at all. It could honestly belong to anyone, really, except for the Wolf Cola card . And Dennis’s license. 

That’s when Mac finds it. 

He slips the license out from its little picture window, for no other reason than it’s just something else to do with his hands, and there it is: a piece of thick paper, folded in fourths, which Mac carefully removes. The old photo has apparently been folded and refolded so many times that the picture has worn off along the creases, but the image is still crystal clear. 

God, they must be twenty-five years younger here, two teenage boys lying on the kind of rust-colored shag carpet that was popular in the 80s and by the 90s was found only in the houses of poor people who couldn’t afford to remodel. Mac knows that because his house had the same kind of carpet, but this picture wasn’t taken at his house—you can see a fireplace in the upper left corner. In fact, Mac has no idea _whose_ house they’re in, has absolutely no memory of this moment whatsoever, but it’s definitely them, Mac wearing his feeble attempt at grunge with a flannel tied around his waist and Dennis with his boy-band hair, slightly long and parted down the middle. (Although in this picture his hair is curly and kind of frizzy, so he’s not really pulling it off.) 

Judging from the red Solo cups scattered across the floor around them, they’re probably passed out, which might contribute to why Mac doesn’t remember this particular scene. Dennis’s head is resting on Mac’s chest and he’s hugging him with one leg slung over Mac’s hips, while Mac’s own arms are wrapped tight around Dennis, his neck bent in a weird angle so his cheek is smushed into Dennis’s hair. None of this looks even remotely comfortable, and they’re both so fucking ugly, but all the same, it’s—well, it’s almost sort of _cute_. They were so young back then.

On the back of the photo is a mess of jagged, angry scribbles, a bunch of things crossed out, except for three words: “DEN LUVS MAC.” Mac doesn’t recognize the handwriting. 

If this is in fact what Charlie meant by “wallet,” then _maybe _Mac can seewhy Charlie wanted him to find the photo at this particular point in time. Charlie probably saw it himself at some point and assumed it meant that Dennis was in love with Mac. 

That interpretation wouldn’t hold up in a court of law, of course. There are too many other reasonable explanations besides thatone. But no matter the explanation, they all point to a single, central truth: on some level, Dennis _does_ give a shit about him.

Grinning, Mac carefully refolds the photo and slips it back into Dennis’s wallet, sliding the license over it. He’s asleep within the minute.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After being away for so long, I felt like I owe you guys at least a LITTLE kissing in this chapter...but it didn't work out. I'm sorry.
> 
> Thx for reading! <3

**Author's Note:**

> Comment me! Comment now! Me comment needing a lot now!
> 
> Thanks for reading! Hope you liked it. Come find me on tumblr if you want. I have the same username there.


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